Heavily overcast and cool. Several deer are running back and forth in the woods, giving me glimpses of their red summer pelts. A thrasher sings a few bars and falls silent.
brown thrasher
3/27/2024
The briefest opening in the clouds for sunrise. The first brown thrasher drops by to sing a few bars. Then the squeaky wheels of goldfinches, converging on my mother’s feeders.
6/28/2023
Overcast and breezy, with a strong smell of burning chemicals. Off in the distance, a brown thrasher is singing whatever pops into his head.
5/14/2022
The rain stops and the thrush singing at the woods’ edge is joined by warblers, flycatchers, pewee, thrasher, a hummingbird’s mad courtship flight…
4/14/2022
Thrasher thrasher says the thrasher. Rising sun a bright smear in the clouds. A winter wren’s boneless ode to joy.
6/4/2021
Rain just past, tree leaves glisten in the sun. A brown thrasher holds forth like a street-corner prophet, hallelujah, hallelujah.
4/29/2021
Two male towhees displaying at each other with what looks almost like affection. A brown thrasher’s one-bird echo chamber. The smell of rain.
5/16/2020
A brown thrasher’s jazz echoes off the barn. In the clear plastic hummingbird feeder, a lampyrid beetle takes a very long time to drown.
4/25/2018
The birds seem unusually active; there must be a fresh bloom of aerial plankton. Even the brown thrasher brings his jazz to the yard.
4/12/2018
A brown creeper scuttles up an oak. A raven flies low over the house—its heavy wingbeats. The first brown thrasher appears in the lilac.
4/20/2017
The rhyming couplets of a brown thrasher. A blue-headed vireo’s dreamy soliloquy. When the sun comes out, raindrops glisten on every twig.
7/1/2016
A brown thrasher sings behind the house, repeating each line as usual like a didactic jazz soloist. The sun struggles blearily to come out.
4/28/2016
Cold drizzle. A brown thrasher improvises at the woods’ edge, and I spot the first tent caterpillar web—a tiny white flag in a wild cherry.
4/17/2015
A brown thrasher’s loud improvisations. For a moment I think some new type of tree is in bloom, but it’s only the rain beading every twig.