BROWN THRASHER
1, 2, 3. Males. 4. Female
It is a performance worth buying a ticket for and going miles to hear; but it is to be heard without price on the outskirts of almost any village in the United States east of the Rocky Mountains and south of Maine. You must go out at the right time, however, for the bird sings but a few weeks in the year, although he remains in New England almost six months, or till the middle of October. He is one of the birds that every one should know, since it is perfectly easy to identify him; and once known, he is never to be forgotten, or to be confounded with anything else.
The thrasher’s nest is a rude, careless-looking structure, made of twigs, roots, and dry leaves, and is to be looked for on the ground, or in a bush not far above it. Often it has so much the appearance of a last year’s affair that one is tempted to pass it as unworthy of notice. I have been fooled in that way more than once.
The bird sits close, as the saying is, and as she stares at you with her yellow eyes, full at once of courage and fear, you will need a hard heart to disturb her. Sometimes she will really show fight, and she has been known to drive a small boy off the field. Her whistle after she has been frightened from her eggs or nestlings is one of the most pathetic sounds in nature. I should feel sorry for the boy who could hear it without pity.
Besides this mournful whistle, the thrasher has a note almost exactly like a smacking kiss,—very realistic,—and sometimes, especially at dusk, an uncanny, ghostly whisper, that seems meant expressly to suggest the presence of something unearthly and awful. So far as I am aware, there is no other bird-note like it. I have no doubt that many a superstitious person has taken to his heels on hearing it from the bushes along a lonesome roadside after nightfall.
Except in the spring, indeed, there is little about the thrasher’s appearance or behavior to suggest pleasant thoughts. To me, at any rate, he seems a creature of chronic low spirits. The world has used him badly, and he cannot get over it. He is almost the only bird I ever see without a little inspiration of cheerfulness. Perhaps I misjudge him.
Let my young readers make his acquaintance on their own account, if they have not already done so, and find him a livelier creature than I have described him, if they can.
V
THE BUTCHER-BIRD
“Butcher-bird” is not a very pretty name, but it is expressive and appropriate, and so is likely to stick quite as long as the more bookish word “shrike,” which is the bird’s other title. It comes from its owner’s habit of impaling the carcasses of its prey upon thorns, as a butcher hangs upon a hook the body of a pig or other animal that he has slaughtered.