The hermit thrush (Catharus guttatus) is a small songbird, widespread across  North America. During breeding season, which is spent in the western and northeastern United States and the southern half of Canada, the hermit thrush sings a song which is widely considered beautiful. This song has featured prominently in the scientific writing, poetry and music of the primarily Anglophone settlers to these regions for the past 200 years, and likely since long before then in the orally transmitted knowledge and folklore of Indigenous peoples. In this interdisciplinary, ecomusicologically-focused paper, I draw on primary scientific, literary and musical sources, as well as on related scholarship from the fields of ecomusicology, zoomusicology, environmental history, literary history, and the biological sciences to tell the story of how hermit thrush song became a symbol of English-speaking American and Canadian cultural identity from the mid-nineteenth through mid-twentieth centuries. In the heyday of the hermit thrush’s cultural potency, writers such as John Burroughs (1837–1921), Walt Whitman (1819–1892), and the Canadian “Confederation Poets” (born in the decade surrounding Canadian confederation) popularized an image of the bird as admirably solitary, aesthetically cultured, and spiritually inspired: this overlapped perfectly with a transcendentalism-influenced sense of self that appealed to much of their readership. The burgeoning mid-nineteenth-century literary magazine industry spread this imagery far and wide, particularly among the North American middle classes (Lupfer 2010, 381, 390; Glazener 1997, 259). From the mid-twentieth century onwards, urbanization and technologically-mediated changes in the ways people relate to the natural world caused the hermit thrush to lose relevance as a cultural symbol, but vestiges of its symbolic power remain.