How to Make a Thrashery — Begin Now 



By MABEL OSGOOD WRIGHT 



IF winter is late in coming, the leaves hang persistently on the oaks and 

 beeches, and the frost has not made the vines too brittle, there is something 

 that you can do in early December that may lure a wonderful musician 

 to your bit of ground next May. 



Time was when the Wood Thrush, Catbird, Rosebreast, and Brown 

 Thrasher were classed with the shy and elusive birds that seldom left dense 

 thickets or wood edges. It is years since Wood Thrushes became regular 

 garden lodgers, and rival Catbirds sang their mocking bravuras from opposite 

 clothes-poles, building nests in the syringas that border the path. Still the 

 Thrasher held aloof. On his fir t arrival, a single bird, or at most a pair, would 

 scratch about among the leaves that collect around the shrubberies, then would 

 follow a brief period of wonderful song from the very top of a half-dead ash tree 

 not too close to the house, but no more would be seen of the birds until the 

 next spring. 



One year, some old pea-brush was left in a heap between garden and field, 

 quick-growing vines seized upon it, and it was meshed into something like a 

 wild tangle. At any rate, the Thrashers thought it genuine and built a nest 

 there, placing it about two feet above the ground. As the male is usually care- 

 ful to choose a perch from which to sing at a wise distance from the nest, so 

 the parent birds took great pains to go around 'Robin Hood's barn,' in their 

 trips to and from their pea-brush home. "If here, why not in the garden 

 itself?" I thought, and then I made a tour of the possibilities within sight of 

 the house itself. 



It was late autumn, the time when, the garden being put in order, there is 

 a little breathing-space for cutting old wood from the shrubberies, and shorten- 

 ing long shoots that are sure to be weighed down and broken by snow and 

 wind. One rather shabby-looking group of shrubs had been selected for 

 special attack, a straggling flock of the prune-leaved spirea, with double white 

 flowers like tiny roses ('Bridal Wreath' was, I think, the name given it in the 

 old garden from which mine came). This spirea, by means of tap-roots, walks 

 along and, if the soil be good, sticks out its elbows and quickly appropriates 

 the surrounding country. Every third year this particular tangle had to be 

 thinned out, and this was its third year. Before ordering wholesale slaughter, 

 I drew near, to see what other plant wanderers had joined the gypsy band, 

 and helped make an almost impenetrable thicket between the flower-corner 

 and the house itself. 



Amid the sharp, straight shoots of spirea were raspberry canes, lilac 

 suckers, several wands of sweetbrier, young tartarian honeysuckle, cornels, 

 and black cherries — all telling that the thicket was a favorite perch for birds. 

 Around this, stretched like arms, long vines of wistaria were clasped, and 



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