Brown Thrasher

This week we caught our first brown thrasher. It took me awhile to figure out what it was. It has the brown coloration and mottling on its white breast that is typical of a thrush, but it is too big to be a thrush. Turns out thrashers are from the Mimidae family, which also includes Northern Mockingbirds and the Gray Catbird.

Every time I've ever seen a thrasher, I've been impressed by their size. The first time I saw a thrasher I was on a run in Almaden Lake park in San Jose. That night I excitedly told my friend C that I'd seen something that looked and behaved like a California towhee-- hopping along the ground and digging in the dirt with its feet, but appeared much larger, as if it were on steroids, and had a beak that curved down. My friend laughed and told me I'd just seen a California thrasher.

I don't know that much about thrashers. Kroodsma (who I just read last night on the train) says males can know up to 2,000 songs, which is perhaps the largest repertoire for any species of songbird. Like other members of the Mimidae family, they mimic other bird sounds, repeating their song in a classic pattern of two songs at a time (in contrast, mockingbirds typically repeat themselves five times before switching to a new song and catbirds repeat themselves three times).

From the little bit I've read about brown thrashers on the internet, everything points to their numbers declining, but no one is entirely sure why.

Here's Eagle Eyes, who got the bird out of the net, holding the thrasher and exposing the brachial vein in order to draw blood on it.