Birding is an absorbing lifetime hobby because you never run out of surprises. The rules are made to be broken.

For example, we know that certain northern species, if they breed at all in Virginia, do so only at sky-scraping elevations.

The hermit thrush, for example.

In Virginia, if you want to hear this species' ethereal territorial song, you need serious altitude.

Think Mount Rogers or White Top.

Hermits are not even found atop Salt Pond Mountain in Giles County, aka Mountain Lake.

That's why several veteran area birders were astounded last week to find five hermit thrushes singing on territory at 2,600 feet, near Kelly Flats and Glen Alton in Giles County.

"It's amazing," said Giles County birder Peggy Opengari. "Ordinarily you'd have to go to some place like Mount Rogers, 3,700 feet or higher, not even Mountain Lake.

"This is the lowest place in Virginia that I know of where they breed."

But that's not all. Opengari and her husband, Bill, along with Virginia Tech ornithologist Jerry Via and others, also had two red-breasted nuthatches.

If the red-breasteds are breeding here, say the Opengaris, it would be an even more improbable find than the hermit thrushes.

Last weekend they also had least flycatchers, veerys, nesting brown creepers, a family group of Blackburnian warblers feeding their young, black-capped chickadees and black-throated blue warblers.

Why are these species nesting at such an abnormally low altitude?

Peggy Opengari says her husband's theory is that there's an anomalous altitudinal microclimate where the mountain topography has created a "very dark, very damp and cooler" spot that mimics higher terrain.

Jerry Via believes the terrain has created a "cold-air funnel that's also very moist" in that spot.

Via says after his close-up encounter last weekend, the hermit thrush is his new avian American Idol.

"For me, it's replaced the wood thrush as the most gorgeous singer," he said.

Which is saying something.

The hermit thrushes are singing now, and if there's one bird whose song is worth a drive, this is it.

"The most gifted songster in all of North America," in the words of ornithologist Donald Kroodsma, this bird has sent poets into ecstasy.

"The grand climax of all bird music," said one American ornithologist a century ago. "The forest has found a tongue," said another.

To check out these low-altitude hermit thrushes, along with the other northern species hanging out in Giles County, head north on Route 460 from Blacksburg.

About a mile before the Pearisburg exit, take a right turn on Route 635 and go exactly 13.5 miles. Then turn left on Glen Alton Road, and go a short difference to the parking area at Kelly Flats. You'll see two fire roads into the Jefferson National Forest. Take the one on the right.

"We were hardly out of the car in this spot," reports Peggy Opengari, "before we heard the hermit thrushes singing."