northeast-flora-and-fauna

Here's another Veery from last spring. Veeries are in a fairly good-sized family of birds, the thrushes . Some of the other thrushes look somewhat similar, some rendition of brown on top and whitish below: Hermit Thrush Swainson's Thrush Wood Thrush Other relatives are red-breasted, making them a little easier to identify: American Robin Eastern Bluebird  And then there are birds that sound like they're related to the thrushes, but are actually a type of warbler : Northern Waterthrush This is the complicated world of the birds. May 18, 2023 at Willowwood Arboretum Photo 292813063, (c) jpviolette, some rights reserved (CC BY-NC)

You knew I needed to do a pun on the Veery's name, didn't you? These birds sound like they're saying "veer", hence their name. You can kind of interpret this as Thrush Week, since this is the 3rd thrush I'm featuring this week. And while the American Robin and Eastern Bluebird are distinctive and colorful enough that misidentifications are rare, the Veery, Swainson's Thrush , Wood Thrush , and Hermit Thrush are all mostly earth-toned above and white-with-some-speckles below. If you're not good with bird vocalizations and don't get a pretty good look at the last 4, identification can be difficult [1]. May 12, 2023 at Lord Stirling Park Photo 282422617, (c) jpviolette, some rights reserved (CC BY-NC) [1] And don't let the names fool you. It's not a Wood Thrush just because you saw it in the woods, and it's not a Hermit Thrush just because it was alone when you saw it.

For Throwback Thursday, here's a bird from around 5 years ago. Back when I was working at Alcatel-Lucent/Nokia [1] I would walk through on-premises woods and meadows where I met this Wood Thrush 1 summer. This is another thrush that's fairly similar to ones like the Hermit Thrush and the Swainson's Thrush . They are considered 1 of the best singers among our song birds. They achieve this because they can sing 2 notes at the same time, and do it in harmony. While males of many birds perform song matching , where a bird sings a song and a rival tries to sing the same song, the more individualistic Wood Thrush will counter a rival's song with a distinct song of their own. Like some other birds, they also have a clever technique to raise as many children as possible in a breeding season. They'll have 1 brood, and before their young are ready to fend for themselves the female will go off and start another brood, leaving the male to provide for the 1st brood.  July 26,...

A couple weeks ago I encountered 2 (presumably) different Brown Thrashers ; at least I saw them almost 2 hours apart and a healthy walk away from each other. Because I don't see them very often I wasn't sure who I was seeing, but the leading candidates were the Brown Thrasher or the Wood Thrush . When I looked at the pictures at home and looked them up in my field guides, the long tail, streaky rather than spotty marks on the breast/belly, and lack of lines near the eye convinced me that I had Brown Thrashers. (Brown Thrashers are also quite a bit larger than Wood Thrushes, though without a "reference bird" like an American Robin nearby it's kind of hard to judge size.) Brown Thrashers are one of our general-purpose mimics, and it's believed that they have an even larger repertoire of songs than their Northern Mockingbird relatives. While the Northern Mockingbird will usually mimic a sound 3 times, the Brown Thrasher will mimic it only twice, making it possi...