Bird Of The Week 12

This Bird of the Week  likes people and in many towns there is one in every yard it seems, in the summertime.

Time for another bird of the week. I really enjoyed meeting everyone last week and seeing all your hard work in your journals. You seem to be starting to get the mystery of birds sorted out a bit. I am hoping you now see why I enjoy birding so much. It is often a challenge to figure out what a bird is and just when you think you know them all pretty well, one comes along that just stumps you.


This weeks bird enjoys a pretty wide range in North America but its range  eliminates most of the northern states and Canada. This bird is placed in bird books in a group of families that are sort of miscellaneous hodgepodge of birds. We have already had a thrasher (you remember the Brown Thrasher) which is one of the families in this group. They range all the way up the California coast but are absent inland in Northern California. Jackson County and Klamath County do get a few of these bird every year so they are not completely absent in Oregon but pretty hard to find for an Oregon list. We have had a couple of records of one straying into Deschutes County but it is a rare bird alert if one shows up. Five states have this bird as their state bird and South Carolina used to have it as a state bird but they decided that the Carolina Wren would make a better state bird. This should give you enough clues that it will be an easy bird.


As you recall, one of the tools for bird identification is to listen to the song. All bets are off with this guy cause he knows the songs of ten to fifteen birds that live nearby and this repertoire changes from region to region as some of the songs they sing in one part of the country would be of birds they would not hear if they lived in another part of the country. But then the very fact that he is doing all these songs, gives away who he is.  So these birds are pretty popular, as you can see by the state bird count, and I think I have pretty much given it away at this point. Have fun and happy birding.


I apologize for the quality of this video, I took it outside my motel in Branson, Missouri and lots of cars started driving by, but you can hear him pretty well and see him fine. Listen closely and you can hear a second bird trying to outdo him in the background.  Among other birds I here in his repertoire, are Carolina Wren, Robin, and Cardinal. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BxnZYMDUp8&feature=youtu.be