Veery

The Veery gets its name from its song. It is typically rendered as a descending series of 3-5 phrases: “vee-ur vee-ur vee-eer ve-er,” and even the common call note is a short “veer” or “view.” Like that of all our thrushes, the song has an ethereal quality and is very musical, due in large part to the two-part voice box possessed by most birds. They do not start singing until after they arrive on their breeding grounds, and males set up their initial territory boundaries primarily using calls. Singing intensifies once females have started nesting, suggesting that the primary function of song is less mate attraction and more ongoing territory defense.

Veeries are strongly associated with deciduous forests, usually near water. Typical habitats in much of New Hampshire include floodplain forests and red maple swamps, and in the northern part of the state they also occur in moist forests with spruce and fir. The nest is built on the ground, usually in dense vegetation such as ferns, and often with a thick layer of leaf litter below it to keep the eggs dry. The 3-5 eggs are incubated for almost two weeks and the young remain in the nest another two weeks prior to fledging. At this point they continue to move around with their parents for two more weeks, during which time they start ranging farther and farther from the nest site, and even their natal territory.

Veeries leave New Hampshire earlier than other thrushes and are hard to find after early September. By early October they’ve arrived in northern South America and continue through the Amazon Basin to an initial wintering area in southern Brazil. They stay there from December through early February, at which point they disperse north or west to spend the rest of the winter in a second territory through early April. The existence of two separate wintering areas was discovered after analyzing data collected by small tracking devices attached to Veeries and might be more common than we think among long-distance migrants.