Yesterday afternoon (Oct. 24) while birding along Campbell Flats Road in Norwich, VT, Sara Eisenhauer, Ed Hack, and I saw a small brownish passerine fly past us and dive abruptly downward into vegetation where the field has not been mowed in recent months. The bird gave one call note which none of us immediately recognized. We never again saw the bird after it landed. Immediate attempts to locate this bird by walking back and forth across the area in which it landed were unsuccessful. It clearly did not fly away yet could not be located in the vicinity where it landed. There was no water under foot in that part of the meadow where the bird landed, but a nearby section commonly holds standing water. This meadow is on the northern side of Campbell Flats Road and west of a drainage stream and driveway.

At the time of observation we suspected we had encountered a bird species with which we were not very familiar.

Later, we independently listed to recordings of call notes and concluded that the call note we had heard best matched that of a Sedge Wren.

The behavior of the bird in disappearing after landing fits with the characterization of Sedge Wren as presented in the authoritative Birds of North America Online: "Regularly runs along ground to evade intruders. A person going to the exact spot where a bird was seen landing finds it difficult to flush again; if it does flush, it frequently will have run several meters in any direction (Howell 1932, JRH). When flushed, usually flies only a short distance before it pitches into the grass (Howell 1932, Roberts 1932, JRH).”