Death of a Grey-cheeked Thrush 

This evening, September 21, 1993, as Danny and I were leaving the house, he noticed a small thrush on the pavement beside the garage. The bird did not fly off at our approach but slowly hopped away from us onto the grass and then into the flower bed. Without much resistance from the little thing we picked it up . It was a bird we had never seen before. We got out the books; Peterson guide to the birds of the East, Golden guide, and the Audubon guide. We found it hard to decide whether it was a Swainsons or a Gray-cheeked Thrush because they are so similar. This bird did not have a distinct eye-ring, a distinguishing characteristic of the Swainsons, so by elimination we beheld our first sighting of the Gray-cheeked, a small Thrush from the far northern tundra lands of Canada
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This small weakened bird had come a thousand miles south and was bound another two-thousand to its wintering grounds in South America. I’m guessing that it is a juvenile bird, as its feathers were a bit frayed at the edges, and I have somewhere read that the adult birds molt after nesting and go forward with new feathers into their migration. If true then this fellow is covering new ground, following a guide inside himself that has him going someplace he has never been before
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Danny and I have seen ninety-two different species of birds in or above our backyard, an eighty-foot by one hundred-foot bit of the top of a little hill at the edge of the Piedmont Plateau, in Delaware county of Pennsylvania. A suburban yard with old fruit trees, a pine, a few hemlocks, rhododendron, and a garden more full of bugs than produce. We are but a few miles from the Delaware River, in the middle of what once had been the Great Deciduous Forest of North America. The internal guide that brought this Gray-cheeked Thrush here today mapped this route over thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of years, and set the path in a way no one understands into the brain and wings of this bird.
They fly at night. The millions of small songbirds migrating with the southing sun out of the north lands move at night above the trees. With dawn they rest wherever they find themselves, refuel as best they can for the next nights journey.
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Dan and I thought that our visitor may have been just exhausted from his journey. We put him in the safety of a large cardboard box, away from the neighborhood cats, put in a branch to perch on, a dish of water and some bugs and worms we found in the garden. At nightfall we returned to let the thrush be off on his long journey. He was dead. The body was still warm, the eyes still shining, but no little heartbeat below the light feathers. This far and no farther. I’ve read that most birds never complete their first migration, out of ten in a nest eight might fledge, six make it through the first summer, maybe only one return from migration. I imagine the whole migration route littered with dead songbirds, like Napoleon’s army retreating from Moscow winter. But I had never seen any, never known any of these casualties personally, even if only briefly. I have tended too much to dwell on the great act and achievement of the mysterious migration. Had not thought too much about how few make it through.
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Ninety-two species of birds have come and gone through this place of ours. The ninety-third came. The force that brought the gray-cheeked thrush to our backyard carried him no farther. Other Thrushes have other destinies, and this September night, over the treetops, they will bear the migrating spirit of this little one south.