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It was April 7 when I first heard the Brown Thrasher singing from the tangle behind the vegetable garden of our neighbor, Mr. Jett. The song has a conversational quality and consists of two phrases, a distinct pause, then two more statements, another pause, and so on. The thrasher is said to imitate other birds but I have never heard of it. For me, he just sings a thrasher song.
I was glad to know that this rufous-red cousin of the mockingbird and catbird had returned. I haven’t seen him yet but I know he is there; he sang from the same thicket last year so there must have been a successful nesting in 1997.
Did the thrasher spend the winter in some dense Florida thicket where he searched for food, as he does here, by using his long bill as a broom, sweeping leaves left and right to uncover insects?
The brown thrasher is the largest of the three mimic thrushes that occur in Virginia. It is also the most beautiful in my opinion, though the charcoal gray and black catbird is certainly an elegant bird. The mockingbird makes up for his drab gray and white plumage by hurling a medley of imitations at the world. There are no thrasher-like pauses for this bird; the torrent of song runs on and on.
The thrasher, mockingbird and catbird are not true thrushes like the robin, bluebird or, that greatest of all vocalists, the
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