Gray-cheeked Thrush | Catharus minimus

Voice

The song is a thin, nasal series of four or five phrases spiralling downward and fading at the end, roughly chee-a, chee-oo, wee-oh, weea. The descending course and the nasal quality separate it from the rising song of Swainson's Thrush. The call is a high, nasal, falling queer, also given by birds passing overhead at night; that nocturnal call is one of the few ways to record the species on migration.

Identification

The upperparts are grey-brown and plain, with no rufous in wing or tail. The face is grey and flat, with a narrow, greyish and often incomplete eye-ring and no buff lores. The upper breast is dull white to faintly buff, with sharply defined dark spots running onto the sides of the throat; the flanks are extensively grey and the belly white. The base of the lower mandible is yellowish to horn-coloured. The legs are pink to greyish pink.

Confusion species

Swainson's Thrush has a full buff eye-ring and buff cheeks — the quickest distinction. Bicknell's Thrush is smaller and warmer brown, with rufous in the tail and primaries, more yellow at the bill base, and a song whose last phrase rises rather than falls. Hermit Thrush has a rufous tail contrasting with the back and cocks its tail. Veery is rufous above with faint spotting. On silent birds the combination of flat grey face, grey flanks and plain grey-brown tail remains the most useful.

Habitat

Dense, low scrub of willow, alder and dwarf birch in the transition between taiga and tundra, and open spruce and balsam fir woodland with thick undergrowth. On Newfoundland it also breeds in low coastal forest and scrub almost down to the sea. On migration it uses thickets, hedgerows, berry-bearing scrub and city parks, usually low and in cover. In winter it keeps to the floor and lower storey of humid tropical lowland forest.

Range and movements

The breeding range runs from eastern Siberia across the whole of Alaska, Yukon, the Northwest Territories and the north of the prairie provinces to northern Ontario, Quebec, Labrador and Newfoundland. Migration passes almost entirely east of the Rockies, over the Midwest and the eastern states, through the Gulf coast and the Mexican lowlands and across the Greater Antilles. It winters in northern South America, chiefly in Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru and northwestern Brazil. Its distribution across the Mexican states on passage can only be derived in broad terms from the literature.

• Breeding (summer)
• Winter
• Passage
• dark = core range, pale = thinly spread

Where and when to look

The best chance is the second half of May in a wood lot at the edge of a town or along a lake, when birds feed briefly in the lower shrub layer. Look first at what is missing: no buff spectacles, no rufous tail. Standing outside on a calm September night and listening for the nasal, falling queer calls overhead will often yield more Gray-cheeked Thrushes than one sees by day.

Conservation

The species is rated Least Concern (LC); the world population is estimated at a few million birds, but the breeding range lies largely beyond the reach of the Breeding Bird Survey, so the trend is poorly measured. The Newfoundland subspecies has declined steeply since the 1980s; the introduced red squirrel, which takes nests, and changes in the coastal forest are named as causes. Elsewhere loss of wintering habitat in the Amazon basin and mortality from collisions with towers and lit buildings on migration are the pressures.

Scientific name

Catharus minimus | (de Lafresnaye, 1848)

De Lafresnaye described the species in 1848 as Turdus minimus, from a trade specimen labelled Bogotá — a wintering bird, not a breeder. Because it was later moved to another genus, author and year stand in parentheses. The genus Catharus comes from Greek katharos 'pure, clean'. The species name minimus is Latin for 'the smallest', although the species is not the smallest of the genus. Both the English and the Dutch name refer to the grey cheek.