Since quarantine started in March of 2020, I have become more and more interested in nature; both animals, plants and insects. I mentioned in an earlier post that I had fallen in love with arachnids and am now on a crusade to save and learn all I can about them.
Long before spiders though, I loved learning about birds. I can't remember what sparked the original interest in birds, but my mom had suddenly taken to watching, feeding and documenting the birds that were coming to our yard. I had gone with her on multiple birding adventures and that gives me a decent amount of information on birds. I know a decent amount of bird calls, species and all that jazz. And then I met a bird that stumped me.
This is Spooner Park. Well, more specifically this is a picture of Turtle Creek...but that's beside the point. I decided to take my friend Zali here to see the creek and just hang out by the water. It hasn't rained in a long time, so the water is really low...so there really wasn't much to see.
Spooner Park isn't very big, so we decided to take one of the very small paths that boarder the creek. Amongst the trees we heard a bird. A bird I had never heard before. The song pattern was all over the place and it kept changing the song! It would repeat something twice, change to something else, repeat that twice and so on. Both of us were stunned and detective mode kicked in.
First we had to find the bird. Easier said than done. We located the source of the sound from a tangle of bushes? at the end of the trail. He was brown with a white belly and brown dots all over his chest. Adorable. We ended up "chasing" this poor bird all the way back to the entrance of the trail where it eventually got tired of us following it and proceeded to fly across the creek.
I then spent the rest of the car ride home trying to figure out what kind of bird it was.
A Brown Thrasher. A totally new bird for me! I got in the house and stole my mom's "Birds of Wisconsin" book and found the Brown Thrasher (of course she had already seen it and had it neatly marked with a sticker...show off).
I found out that the Brown Thrasher is only usually in Wisconsin for breeding so, during spring and summer. They seem to be a south eastern bird, spending winters in Texas or living year round in places like The Carolinas, Florida and Tennessee. They have one of the "largest repertoires of any North American songbird." They also are common nests for Brown-Headed Cow Birds to lay their eggs in, but the Brown Thrasher seems to be pretty smart and will kick the egg from the nest (Cow Birds are parasitic birds that lay their eggs in the nests of other birds). They are similar to Northern Mockingbirds and can copy the songs of other birds, but the difference is that the Brown Thrasher repeats their phrases in twos. Super cool!!
I love learning about new animals. It's exciting to see something you have never seen or have never taken notice of and learn something new! I haven't seen a Brown Thrasher since (they are common birds, but I don't live in an area where they like to nest), but I will never forget their song.
(image from allaboutbirds.org)
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