Getting Far from Carolina

Courtesy of Neal Lewis
My brother, a carpenter, called last night and we ended up talking birds for a bit. He travels around the greater D.C. area for work, and in Falls Church he encountered a pair of Carolina wrens who were on eggs in a part of a house that was to be torn out. Ray is not sentimental about such things, and would have simply removed the nest, put it somewhere else and wished them good luck. But he was surprised by the younger carpenters who work for him. They all wanted to “save” the nest and even named the parents, “Mary and Joseph.”

Carolina wrens (Thryothorus ludovicianus) are a dime a dozen in northern Virginia, so it wouldn’t have hurt the population if one pair in Falls Church lost one brood. But the carpenters set about building a whole new nest for the birds on a part of the house that would remain undisturbed by their renovation. With Ray’s guidance, they mimicked the spatial conditions that the wrens like, strapped their contraption to a soffit and moved the egg-filled nest into it. They waited anxiously for the parents to respond. Carolina wrens being Carolina wrens—brassy and bold—they followed their eggs to the new location and went on with their lives. Breathing sighs of relief, so did the carpenters.

I have a birdwatching journal that I kept between the ages of 14 and 18. On the first page I wrote a list of species I had seen since starting to watch birds in earnest four years earlier. While I added the time of year I saw them, I didn’t note the place, but these were my neighborhood birds. The list is 66 species long. The Carolina wren is #23 (after house wren) with the notation: “sgle. sighting.”

Unfortunately, in this summary list I didn’t document the specific dates of these sightings. The fact that I had started record keeping was a good thing, but there was room for improvement. So, I can only report that sometime between 1970 and 1975 the Carolina wren reached the mid-Hudson Valley of New York. According to bird guides of that era, it had remained on the coast in the Northeast for the first half of the 20th century, with only vagrants venturing further north.

The Birds of New Hampshire (2013) notes the first sighting of T. ludovicianus in 1880 at Rye Beach. Before 1950 all subsequent reports were from the Connecticut and Merrimack river valleys. It was not until 1991 that breeding was first documented at Hudson and Durham. The species does not migrate, so it had been seen in all seasons, but until 1991 these birds had been

the equivalent of Balboa, Pizarro, or Cabot, intrepid explorers wandering the wilderness, not all of whom were destined to survive the journey.

The Carolinas were initially a rather nebulous region of the American South. In a general way they were claimed as part of Florida by Ponce de Leon in 1513. In February 1562 the French established Charlesfort on what is now Parris Island, South Carolina. The leaders of the French expedition were Huguenots. In naming their settlement after their sovereign, Charles IX, they could hardly know that he was that very month ordering the massacre of their fellow Protestants St. Valentine’s Day. By the following century this region was included in the English claim to Virginia, named for the “Virgin Queen,” Elizabeth I.

The land, like the Earth itself (“Mother Nature”), was regarded as female, so even when new claims honored male sovereigns, the place-names were feminized. Hence, the southern portion of the Virginia province was named for Charles I before his untimely end at the hands of Oliver Cromwell and the New Model Army in 1649.

In the 19th century biologists developed the concept of “life zones.” In a 1938 summary paper in The Quarterly Review of Biology, Rexford F. Daubenmire wrote: “Our present concepts of bioclimate provinces have had their origins in the purely floristic and faunistic studies. With the development of the taxonomy of North American species various distributional patterns appeared, and whenever several of these seemed related they were made the basis of a province.”

The eastern deciduous forests (a floristically defined province) were called the Carolinian Zone. (The eastern mixed deciduous-coniferous forest constitutes the Alleghenian Zone.) Fauna received their common names—Carolina parakeet, Carolina wren—or scientific names—Melanerpes carolinus (red-bellied woodpecker), Sitta carolinensis (white-breasted nuthatch)—in recognition of their association with that region or zone. Some, like the Carolina chickadee (Poecile carolinensis) managed to get both names through their provenance. Others, like Euphagus carolinus (rusty blackbird), basically a Canadian bird, are misnamed, probably having been initially shot and identified during migration. T. ludovicianus is named for the Louisianian Zone, which honors a whole other monarch, Louis XIV, and includes some broad-leaved evergreens.

The Carolina wren’s tendency to follow the coasts and river valleys northward reflects its preference for the deciduous “Carolinian forest.” Water holds heat well and releases it very slowly, so proximity to water has a warming effect, allowing southern assemblages to extend northward near it. My first encounter with the Carolina wren was in the Hudson Valley, also known for supporting isolated populations of prickly-pear cactus and eastern fence lizards at

the, respectively, inland and northern extremes of their ranges. In New Hampshire I found T. ludovicianus in Monadnock Park along the Sugar River, a branch of the Connecticut.

Last night, from the heartland of its range in northern Virginia, my brother reported that the parent wrens were feeding the hatchlings, but the renovation job was ending. His crestfallen fellow carpenters learned from Ray that they would not see Mary and Joseph’s children fledge. But my brother will have to go back to the house eventually. The homeowner wants that nest-box contraption gone as soon as it is vacant, and the carpenters want their tightening strap back.

Bill Chaisson has been a birdwatcher for over 50 years. He is a former managing editor of the Eagle Times. He now lives and works in Wilmot.