Monthly Archives: September 2024

Brown thrasher is a bird with a bold personality

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Photo by Bryan Stevens
A pair of Brown Thrashers forage for food on the ground below a feeder.

I’ve been enjoying fall migration, but I’ve not seen as many species of birds as I would like. So far, I’ve observed a few warblers, including black-and-white warbler, common yellowthroat, magnolia warbler, Tennessee warbler and American redstart. Other interesting sightings have included wood thrush, several ruby-throated hummingbirds and a gray catbird. I’ve also observed brown thrashers after going most of the spring and summer without seeing any.

Brown thrashers are by nature both bold and reclusive. I was reminded of that fact during some recent lawn chair birding at home. I heard a quarrelsome thrasher calling from a thicket. I produced some squeaks to get the bird’s attention. As a result, the thrasher soon materialized like a feathered ghost deep in the branches of a shrub. I got a brief look in my binoculars at the bird and saw one baleful pale yellow eye staring back at me.

Photo by Ken Thomas
The Brown Thrasher is an alert, sharp-eyed observer of its surroundings.

A few years ago, quite by accident, I experienced a similar sighting when I came across a brown thrasher nest. I hadn’t gone looking for it. The nest, expertly woven into a thicket of honeysuckle vines, was tucked beneath a sheltering eave of an outdoor storage building. I don’t think anything but a fortunate accident could have ever revealed the nest. I still remember peeking into that tangle of vines and seeing a golden eye staring back. The bird didn’t look in the least pleased that I had accidentally stumbled across her nest.

The otherwise extroverted brown thrasher, which prefers to nest in difficult-to-access, tangled messes, found the cluster of vines a perfect location. For those not familiar with brown thrashers — relatives of the Northern mockingbird — they are known for their feisty and fearless protection of their nest and young. I’m probably fortunate the thrasher on her nest decided to choose stealth instead of attack. Sometimes, discretion is truly the better part of valor and the bird probably decided that, if she remained motionless, she would blend in well with her surroundings.

I was probably fortunate to escape with no more than a stern, unhappy glare from the nesting thrasher. According to th website All About Birds, brown thrashers are aggressive in defense of their nest. The birds are known to strike people and dogs hard enough to draw blood.

Brown Thrashers are accomplished songsters that may sing more than 1,100 different song types and include imitations of other birds, including chuck-will’s-widows, wood thrushes and Northern flickers.

The brown thrasher (Toxostoma rufum) belongs to the family of “mimic thrushes,” which provides a label for a group of songbirds capable of imitating the songs of other birds. Mimidae, the Latin root for “mimic,” provides the scientific name for the family, which includes mockingbirds and the New World catbirds, as well as thrashers. The Northern mockingbird is best known for the ability to mimic, but relatives like the gray catbird and brown thrasher are also talented mimics.

The thrasher is a fairly large songbird about 11.5 inches long with a wingspan of 13 inches. Much of the body length comes from the bird’s long tail feathers. A thrasher weighs, however, only about 2.5 ounces.

Early American naturalist and artist John James Audubon painted a dramatic scene of Brown Thrashers defending their nest from an attacking snake.

The brown thrasher is not a picky eater. It’s known to eat everything from berries and nuts to insects and small lizards. It’s also aggressive in defending its nest and young. John James Audubon, a French-American ornithologist, naturalist and painter, painted quite a dramatic scene of a group of brown thrashers valiantly defending a nest from an attacking snake. The painting is so detailed that one must imagine Audubon based his work on a real-life experience. His work, originally painted in the early decades of the 1800s, still holds up today. The scene comes almost alive to the viewer and confirms Audubon’s skill at capturing extremely accurate moment in the lives of the birds he painted.

Incidentally, Audubon knew the brown thrasher as the “ferruginous thrush.” Another former common name for this species was “brown thrush.”

The thrashers are familiar birds in southern gardens. In fact, the brown thrasher is the official state bird of Georgia and also provided the name for Atlanta’s National Hockey League team, the Atlanta Thrashers. The thrasher became Georgia’s state bird due to passage of a Joint Resolution of the Georgia General Assembly in 1970.

Returning to the expressive nature of brown thrashers, I think it’s the bird’s golden eyes that make them seem so alert and attentive. Once they feel secure in a lawn or garden, they become less shy. As one might expect from a large songbird, thrashers have voracious appetites. Among the feeder fare I offer, thrashers seem to prefer suet cakes. They’re not woodpeckers, however, so the awkward attempts of these long-tailed birds to access the suet offer some comic antics for observers.

As a larger songbird, brown thrashers also tend to live a little longer than smaller birds. The oldest brown thrasher on record was at least 10 years, 11 months old, according to All About Birds. This individual was found in Florida in 1978 where it was banded in 1967.

The brown thrasher is the only thrasher that ranges east of the Mississippi River. Other species occur in the western half of the nation, including sage thrasher, long-billed thrasher, California thrasher, Crissal thrasher, LeConte’s thrasher, curve-billed thrasher and Bendire’s thrasher.

As autumn progress, I wish everyone luck with their own birding.

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To ask a question, make a comment or share a sighting email me at ahoodedwarbler@aol.com.

Photo by Bryan Stevens
Brown Thrasher perched in a mimosa tree.

Birds share fall skies with migrating butterflies, dragonflies

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During a stop at the Unicoi Walmart to visit the pharmacy on Wednesday, Sept. 3, I spied an energetic fluttering of wings in the garden center. Although I’ve spied various birds, including Carolina wrens and house sparrows, making themselves at home in this garden center, this winged creature was quite a bit smaller.

I watched the butterfly flit from marigold to zinnia to fall mums, feasting on the nectar the blooms provided. A closer look revealed the butterfly’s identity as a long-tailed skipper, a species more likely found in South Carolina, Georgia and Florida than Northeast Tennessee.

Photo by Bryan Stevens • A long-tailed skipper sips nectar from a marigold at the garden center at the Unicoi Walmart.

According to Wikipedia, the long-tailed skipper is a spread-winged skipper butterfly found throughout tropical and subtropical South America, south to Argentina and north into the eastern United States and southern Ontario. It cannot live in areas with prolonged frost. I have seen lots of them in South Carolina and Georgia; this is my second sighting of one in Northeast Tennessee. I found the first one in a garden in Elizabethton near the Covered Bridge.

The sighting reminded me that it’s not only birds using the skies for migration as we advance toward the autumn season. I also remembered a question I got from a reader back in 2014. Rhonda Eller of Chilhowie, Virginia, posted a question on my Facebook page about some dragonflies that appeared in her yard on Sept. 10.

“We have had a sudden breakout of dragonflies in our yard,” Rhonda explained. “We seldom see more than one or two at a time.”

Rhonda wondered if the dragonflies might have been drawn to her yard in pursuit of some sort of favorite insect prey. She also speculated that the recent dry conditions might have attracted the dragonflies.

Photo by Bryan Stevens • The wandering glider is a migratory species of dragonfly.

I responded at the time to her query by explaining that birds share the skies at this time of year with many other migrants. Some dragonflies, just like birds, migrate. A species known as green darner is one that migrates. These darners are rather large, for a dragonfly, and travel in swarms. A couple of years ago I observed thousands of these dragonflies swarming over a municipal swimming pool and a nearby fish pond at Erwin Fishery Park.

The WSLS Channel 10 television station out of Roanoke, Virginia, reported on swarms of dragonflies so large that they got picked up by local radar. Rhonda shared a link to the station’s story on my Facebook page.

Of course, swarms of migrating insects are bound to get the attention of predatory birds. The same day that Rhonda experienced the influx of migrating dragonflies, I witnessed dozens of common nighthawks and chimney swifts swooping through the skies over my home. With a little more attention to detail, I also noticed the dragonflies sharing the skies with these birds.

I suspect that the nighthawks were feeding on the large darners while the swifts, which are much smaller birds, focused their foraging efforts on smaller winged insects. Tom McNeil, a neighbor and fellow member of the Elizabethton Bird Club, reported seeing nighthawks and swifts, too. Tom lives on the other side of a mountain ridge that separates our homes.

Tim Morris, a Facebook friend from Australia, noted in a comment on my post about the nighthawks that his country is home to a bird known as the tawny frogmouth, a relative of the common nighthawk. Tim noted that frogmouths are big birds with camouflage markings that allow them to pretend to be dead tree boughs by day. “They feed not only on insects but mice and lizards, too,” he added.

Evidence of fall migration continued the next day when I detected a small wave of warblers foraging in trees at the edge of my yard. I saw five different species — American redstart, worm-eating warbler, Cape May warbler, Blackburnian warbler and Tennessee warbler — in the space of half an hour. Of the warblers in the flock, the Blackburnian and Cape May are some of the more vibrant ones.

So far in 2024, warblers have absented themselves from my yard this fall. It’s started to aggravate me, but I’ll try to be patient.

The Blackburnian warbler’s common name commemorates Anna Blackburne, an English naturalist who lived from 1726 to 1793. Her brother, Ashton, had immigrated to the United States, which made it possible for him to send his sister many specimens, especially birds. Their father, a salt merchant by trade, was also a well-respected amateur naturalist. In addition to the warbler that bears her name, Anna Blackburne also had a species of beetle named in her honor.

Both the Cape May and Tennessee warblers are named for the locations from which they were first collected. Neither of these small songbirds are closely affiliated with Cape May, New Jersey, or the Volunteer State. The Cape May warbler is also known as the “tiger warbler” for the dramatic black striping across its bright yellow breast. A green back and chestnut cheek patch make the Cape May warbler quite unlike any of its close kin. Even its former scientific name — Setophaga tigrina — paid homage to the striped big cat. The term “setophaga” translates to “moth eater” and is a reference to this warbler’s intense fondness for the caterpillars known as spruce budworms that occasionally produce outbreaks in the northern spruce forests that serve as the nesting range for the Cape May warbler.

According to the website, “All About Birds,” Cape May warblers have unusually shaped tongues that allow them to sip nectar from tropical flowers during the winter months spent in Central America and the Caribbean. Their unique tongues also make it possible for them to enjoy sips of sugar water from hummingbird feeders.

Whether its dragonflies, nighthawks, warblers, hummingbirds or a long-tailed skipper in a Walmart garden center, plenty of birds and other flying creatures will be moving through the region for the next few weeks. Now’s the time to get outdoors and look for some of these migrants.

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Bryan Stevens has been birding actively for about 30 years. He has written a weekly column on birds and birding since 1995. To ask a question, make a comment or share a sighting, email him at ahoodedwarbler@aol.com.

September brings spike in bird migration

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Hans Toom/Pixabay • Few warblers make as great a journey as the blackpoll warbler. This small songbird makes a roundtrip flight of 12,400 miles for its seasonal migrations each year.

September’s arrival puts fall migration into sharp focus. The birds that returned this past spring — the warblers, vireos, tanagers, grosbeaks, flycatchers, hawks, hummingbirds and many more — have begun or are beginning to make their way back to the locations where they will spend the winter months far from the cold, bleak conditions over most of North America.

Every morning as I leave for work I hear the buzz of hummingbird wings. When I return in the evening, I am often greeted by the scolding calls of red-eyed vireos from the woodlands around my home.

Some of these birds migrate out of the tropics every spring to avoid competition. Others find North America a land of abundant, albeit temporary, resources. This land of plenty offers a wealth of insects, seeds, fruit and other nourishing, nutritious food to help parent birds keep their strength while they work to ensure their young thrive. Of course, once the bountiful period concludes, they return to the tropics of Central and South America to winter. Those that do so successfully will make the journey back to the United States and Canada in the spring. It’s an ongoing cycle, repeating year after year, season after season.

The phenomenon of migration isn’t exclusive to the neotropical migrants of the New World. Birds in other parts of the world migrate, too. Waterfowl, shorebirds and raptors are among some of the families of birds that stage impressive migrations.

Photo by Jonathan Cannon/Pixabay.com • The Arctic tern outdoes all other birds when it comes to migration. These seabirds journey from their Arctic nesting grounds to spend the winter around the Antarctic, a journey of some 50,000 miles a year.

The Arctic tern, for example, truly takes migration to extremes. This small seabird travels each year from its Arctic nesting grounds to the Antarctic region, where it spends the winter months. Put into terms of mileage, the Arctic tern can travel about 50,000 miles in a single year. For a bird with a body length of about 15 inches and a wingspan of about 28 inches, this incredible migration is an astonishing feat. These statistics permit the Arctic tern to easily lay claim to the title of champion migrant among our feathered friends.

According to the website for National Geographic, Arctic terns face a serious threat from climate change. In a profile on the tern at its website, National Geographic warns that Arctic terns are projected to lose 20 to 50 percent of their habitat due to the temperature changes linked to climate change. They also face loss of habitat due to encroachment by human activities such as oil drilling.

The ruby-throated hummingbird, a favorite of many bird enthusiasts living in the eastern United States, makes an impressive migration each year. Just to reach the United States, these tiny birds undertake a strenuous journey. They leave their wintering grounds in Central America to return to the United States and Canada for the nesting season. Most of these tiny birds, which are barely four inches long, make a non-stop flight of more than 500 miles across the Gulf of Mexico. The journey can take almost an entire day. With the end of summer, the entire population of ruby-throated hummingbirds, increased by a new generation of young birds, makes the Gulf crossing for a second time in a year to return to the American tropics for the winter months.

Photo by Bryan Stevens • A ruby-throated hummingbird perches at a feeder for a sip of sugar water.

Among North America’s buteo hawks, which includes raptors such as red-shouldered hawk and red-tailed hawk, the broad-winged hawk stands out as a dedicated migrant. These hawks form flocks that at times number in the hundreds or thousands as they sail and glide on thermals rising over various mountain ranges. These hawks and other raptors are well-known in the region for migrating past the Mendota Fire Tower in Southwest Virginia every September and early October.

The broad-winged hawk’s counterpart in the western United States is Swainson’s hawk, which shares the broad-winged hawk’s inclination for migrating in large flocks. Swainson’s hawk is named for William Swainson, the famous 19th century English naturalist for which Swainson’s thrush is also named.

The hooded warbler, my favorite member of the migratory New World warblers, migrates back to Mexico and Central America for the winter months after nesting during the spring and summer in a range concentrated in the southeastern United States. The males, after going quiet in late summer, have started singing on occasion from the shaded woods around my house. I think this has more to do with restlessness as they prepare for to depart on a migration flight that will take them to the balmy Caribbean, Mexico and Central America while we shiver through the months between October and April. It’s not a migration of an incredible distance, but it’s still quite an accomplishment for a bird only five inches long and weighing less than half an ounce.

Another warbler is a true migratory champion. Few warblers make as great a journey as the blackpoll warbler. Instead of migrating over land, this five-inch-long warbler undertakes a two-stage migration. The first half of the migration is a non-stop flight of about 1,500 miles. Every fall, these tiny birds fly over the Atlantic Ocean during this part of their migration, departing from Canada or the northern United States and not stopping until they reach various locations in the Caribbean. There they will spend some time recovering from the exhausting first half of their journey before they continue their way to such South American countries as Colombia and Venezuela. Once again, during the time they spend flying over open ocean, these tiny warblers do not feed.

Fall’s a great time to witness the variety of avian life. Look for some of these migrants passing through your yards, gardens or favorite birding spots.

For those wanting suggestions for seeking out migrating birds, the linear trail in Erwin, Rocky Fork State Park in Flag Pond and Limestone Cove Recreation Area are some good bets.

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To ask a question, make a comment or share a sighting, email me at ahoodedwarbler@aol.com. 

Elizabethton Bird Club announces speakers for fall programs

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Brayden Paulk will speak to the Elizabethton Bird Club on Sept. 3 on the topic of microfishing.

The Lee and Lois Herndon Chapter of Tennessee Ornithological Society, also known as the Elizabethton Bird Club, will soon begin its schedule of monthly meetings for 2024-25.

The brief business meetings are always accompanied by an informative and entertaining program on birds, birding or other subjects from the natural world.

These programs are a great way to learn more about our feathered friends as well as other related subjects from the natural world. They are free, open to the public and hosted by a welcoming group of people.

Here’s the schedule for Fall 2024:

September

Brayden Paulk, a young naturalist with family ties in Unicoi County, will present the first program on Tuesday, Sept. 3, with a talk on “Microfishing,” which involves anglers focusing on a diverse array of tiny species of fish.

Paulk has also been working as a naturalist with Lamar Alexander Rocky Fork State Park this summer and fall. He gave a program a couple of years ago for the club on “Trash Fishing,” which explored other angling options other than the typical gamefish species. As both fishing and birding are among his interests, he will no doubt find a way to work something into his program about birds.

October

The guest speaker for the meeting on Tuesday, Oct. 1, will be Mark Stevens. A former publisher for The Erwin Record, he will present a program titled “Building a Birding Festival” that will focus on his development of the Hammock Coast Birding Festival in South Carolina. Stevens, who works as tourism director for the Georgetown County Chamber of Commerce, will be giving the program remotely from his home in South Carolina, but the hybrid meeting also offers a chance to attend in-person with other birding enthusiasts. The festival is organized by the South Carolina Hammock Coast, the marketing arm for the Georgetown County Chamber. The third annual Hammock Coast Birding Festival is scheduled for Feb. 6-9, 2025.

November

Vern Maddux, the treasurer for the club, will be the speaker on Tuesday, Nov. 5. Maddux is a world traveler when it comes to seeing birds and will present a program on one of his recent international birding adventures to South Georgia and Falklands. South Georgia is a mountainous barren island in the South Atlantic Ocean, 800 miles east-southeast of the remote South Atlantic archipelago that makes up the Falkland Islands. With rugged terrain and cliff-lined coasts, the hundreds of islands and islets in the Falklands are home to sheep farms and abundant birdlife.

December

In the busy month of December, yours truly will give the program. I will present a powerpoint presentation titled “What’s in a Name?” on North American birds named after people. Among our native birds, we have quail, woodpeckers, sparrows, finches, warblers, hawks and other birds are known by names of historical figures ranging from John James Audubon to William Clark and Meriwether Lewis.

My program will be held on Tuesday, Dec. 3. I will discuss the American Ornithological Society’s decision in 2023 to end what are known as eponyms, in which species names honor people. The renaming of dozens of species will be a gradual process.

The club’s 2025 schedule has not been completed, but will include a program by local naturalist Lewis Tester in the spring on dragonflies.

The public is always welcome to attend these programs. Programs begin at 7 p.m.

The club meets at the Elizabethton campus of Northeast State Community College in Room 135 when the school’s schedule permits. When school is not in session, meetings are held on Zoom or at other announced locations. To receive updates on the club’s schedule, events and activities, email elizabethtonbirtdingclub@gmail.com and ask to be placed on a free mailing list.

The Elizabethton Bird Club holds seasonal birds count in spring, summer, fall and winter. The club also organizes and sponsors regular field trips to destinations through Northeast Tennessee. These activities are also open to interested members of the public.

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To share a sighting, make a comment or ask a question, email me at ahoodedwarbler@aol.com.