Carolina Wren

I have so many Carolina wren stories it’s hard to know where to start.

If you’re ever in the eastern woods and you hear a bird singing and you think that’s beautiful, what bird is that? there’s a good chance it’s a Carolina wren.

These little gregarious, brown, slightly hook-billed birds are champion singers and, insatiably curious. According to my kids we’ve had about ten birds come in the bus in five years of traveling. Nine of them have been Carolina wrens¹. Several of them have ended up having to be rescued by hand.

Before that they used to come in our house in Athens from time to time. This one would sit on the corner of the roof singing every morning for years.

Well, it seemed like the same bird, but who knows. Birds do have individual songs, especially Carolina wrens, so if I had been paying attention I might know if it really was the same bird, but I didn’t pay that much attention back then. Life before the road tended to run together, I lacked focus and attention. Which isn’t to say the days don’t sometimes run together on the road, or that I live in a state of constantly heightened awareness, just that there are more markers by which to measure on the timeline of our travels.

To tell the truth I didn’t pay much attention to wrens until we started to travel. I’ve always associated wrens with the desert southwest where the canyon wrens are a familiar sound in the red rock country of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado.