Early Brown Thrasher
Greetings,
Looking out the window today around 4:00 PM, I noticed a large rufous-colored bird scratching and over-turning leaves in the hedgerow that borders my driveway. Upon closer inspection with binoculars it turned out to be an adult BROWN THRASHER, the first I have observed in several months. My guess is it is one of the adults that has breed on the neighboring property over the course of the last few years.
Trying to document the bird with a photograph was fairly hard due to the overcast conditions and low light, but I took several dozen photographs with my point and shoot canon digital through my binoculars. The best photo that I managed follows:
Looking at the dates posted on our Northeast Spring Arrival Dates page, this bird is a good month and a half early (on average). Does anyone else have early dates for Brown Thrasher from around this time? Regardless of why, it is a very cool sighting. With Northern Cardinals and House Finches singing, and now this sighting, it is hard to not feel that spring is on the way!
~Chad
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February 26th, 2008 @ 7:35 pm
Beautiful sight! I hope it has shelter tonight!
Nancy
February 27th, 2008 @ 2:33 pm
Nancy,
Well, I have no idea on how long the thrasher has been around, but I do know that it survived last night. It was observed feeding around the foundation of the house today, as well as underneath my platform feeder. It was gobbling up sunflower seeds at a very fast pace. Let’s see if it sticks around for a while.
March 4th, 2008 @ 3:40 pm
I’m not sure if anyone is still following this thread or not. At any rate, the thrasher continues to be observed in the yard, which is somewhat surprising. With all the rain coming today and melting snow, one would guess there would be more leaf litter and ground exposed to give the thrasher ample opportunities to forage. Well, for most of the afternoon it continues to eat spilled Black Oil Sunflower seed underneath the feeder. Nothing like a free lunch I guess.
The fact that the thrasher remains in the area still leads me to believe that it is the same individual that either nested at my neighbors property, or is the mate of that bird. Time will tell…