Scratcher of heads, rubber of bellies
This might as well be a portrait of me each spring when I try to convince myself the pool is warm enough and I should just jump in and start swimming. I don’t like being cold in the slightest so it always takes a bit of convincing. Always nice to find a thrasher in an expressive pose as it can be hard to convey their personalities in pictures.
We left blue jays behind when we moved to Oregon but gained scrub jays and the occasional Steller’s jay. The large gregarious birds were a favorite of our cat Emma who would chirp to me from her perch in my office to let me know who was visiting our backyard, crows and flickers also being favorites. In Arizona we have another noisy neighbor I think she would have loved, here sitting in a flowering ocotillo on a warm spring morning. I saw a number of curve-billed thrashers on my walk last weekend in addition to this one, one pair was already feeding hungry babies in a nest in the arms of a saguaro.
A fluffed-out thrasher sings in the last light of day from a dead but still prickly perch.
The curve-billed thrasher is common here but not so the two-tailed thrasher, this is the only one I’ve seen. To my eyes it looks like a failure in design, one tail in front and one behind, but perhaps I’m not the best judge since one of us soars above the desert and one of us gets dizzy standing on a ladder.
Even with a relatively long beak, come springtime curve-billed thrashers end up with faces covered in pollen courtesy of the massive flowers of the saguaro. Saguaros are many things, subtle is not one of them. I’m thankful for the mercy of these large flowers, because if they were carnivorous they could easily eat their fill of desert birds who thrust their entire heads into the blossoms (and later, fruit) to feed.
The rising sun illuminates a battered old saguaro, some of its arms shattered in half and some broken off altogether. But it still has a host of hallelujah arms raised towards heaven, all now fruiting and not just hopefully starting new life from its seeds but sustaining the lives of others with its fruit, a prized treat for many birds. In the picture below, taken just before the sun rose, a curve-billed thrasher feeds atop one of the taller arms.
With the sun rising behind me and Brown’s Mountain before, this is my more typical view of curve-billed thrashers, watching me watching it from high atop a saguaro on the wonderful Latigo Trail.
As we approach the anniversary of our first year in the house I added my 37th yardbird today, of all things a ladder-backed woodpecker. I saw 26 birds in our sixteen years at our Portland house, the urban neighborhood didn’t lend itself to the diversity of wildlife we see here. Equally as delightful are the numerous regulars we see despite the small size of the backyard, including the first bird I saw after we bought the house, the curve-billed thrasher. One is currently feeding a fledgling though we’ve not yet passed the Ides of March! As piercing as their yellow eyes is their song, while I was photographing some woodpeckers a month ago a nearby thrasher let out such an ear-piercing cry I’m surprised I didn’t fall over into the pool! More typically I hear their calls carrying across the desert as they are frequent companions on the trails, one of the many joys of the desert.
When I think of flower stalks I think of the delicate stems of the wildflowers I’d see on hikes through most of my life, like daisies or columbine or fairly slippers. The soaptree yucca, on the other hand, has a towering stalk that’s thick at the base like a tree limb before tapering into thin branches at the top. Even so it is a testament to how impossibly light birds are that this bedraggled thrasher only slightly depressed its perch as it sang on a sunny winter morning.
Word of advice little one, i keep a bowl on my nightstand where I put all the contents of my pockets, it’s the only way I stay organized.
Boolie 