THRUSH COUSINS 



of dusting itself in the road and which one sees flitting 

 into the thickets. It returns from the South about the 

 last of April, and when it mounts up on a roadside 

 bush or sapling and pours out a flood of song, it is sup- 

 posed by farmers, according to the old adage, to be 

 calling out, "Plant corn, plant corn." The thrasher 

 probably is no farmer, but it arrives and begins to sing 

 at about the usual corn-planting season. It is really 

 a remarkable songster, one of the most gifted of our 

 feathered musicians. Toward the end of May the 

 nest with its four or five eggs finely dotted all over with 

 brown may be found by the sharp-eyed and persistent 

 searcher in a thicket, either on the ground, or, more 

 generally, several feet up in the bushes. 



I used to wonder why the bird was called a thrasher. 

 But after I had actually received a real thrashing from 

 a pair of them, I thought I had some light upon the 

 subject. Ordinarily they are quite timid and retiring, 

 and, though I had heard of cases where they were very 

 bold in defending their nests, in all my experiences I 

 had found them as timid as most song birds. But on 

 the afternoon of June 18, 1906, toward sundown, I was 

 driving homeward along a country road, on one side of 

 which was a farmhouse, on the other a bushy pasture. 

 Here I saw a Brown Thrasher fly across the road just 

 ahead of me, carrying in its bill a large worm. It flew 

 down into the pasture and alighted upon the top of a 

 dead sprout which projected from a thick clump of 

 bushes. After pausing for a moment to look around 



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