The Leconte Thrasher 
Orn. Club, no. 2, 1887, p. 53 (Colorado Desert; breeding habits); Gilman , Condor, 
vol. vi., 1904, p. 95 (habits); Grinnell and Swarth, Univ. Calif. Pub. Zool., vol. x., 1913, 
p. 304 (possible hybrid, lecontei x redivivum ); Pemberton, Condor, vol. xviii., 1916, 
p. 219, figs. (desc. nests; photos). 
SMOKE-BUSH, yucca, palo verde, cholla, creosote! the very names 
envisage something different, while they recall to the mind of the devotee 
a sum of allurement for which he will periodically forswear comfort, 
companionship, civilization,—everything that life holds dear, save the 
easing of that mystic pain for which alone the desert has an antidote. 
Take the creosote, that mere cumberer of the ground, which grows only 
where nothing else will or can. What good is it? Yet a crushed spray, 
redolent as a drug store, looses a fever in the blood. At its summons 
one spreads wide arms of welcome to the appalling sun, greets the shim¬ 
mering, gashed desert ranges as brothers, and wants to hug the whole 
pitiless, precious, awful aggregation of burning terrors to his starved 
bosom. Why—I cannot tell. Ask the Leconte Thrasher. He was 
here first, he the pioneer, the authentic desert rat! He came skipping 
merrily over the desert sands or ever the creosote was sprouted. He 
saw the first smoke-bush, that miracle of the eternal campfire, forever 
billowing its gray browns and its outer eddies of clearer blue-green grays, 
yet forever unconsumed. He paused with tail uplifted, or else pumping 
gently from the exertion of the run; and he glanced over his shoulder 
at the first horned toad who had dared to match his skin against the 
burning sands. And when the first cholla set its angular array of bristling 
spines, the Leconte Thrasher chirruped to his mate and said, “Go to, 
we will build our home in yon spiny heart”; and it was so. Wherefore, 
if you would know anything of the desert, ask old man Leconte. He 
knows. 
He knows; but he will not tell; for of all recluses he is the shyest. 
Among all capable songsters, likewise, his voice, is the rarest. The 
testimony* of Mr. M. Trench Gilman, of Banning, is emphatic on this 
latter point. “Lor some time I doubted the statement made by some 
writers that this Thrasher was a fine singer, but was finally ‘shown’ by 
the bird himself. While standing one evening on a high-drifted hill of 
white sand about two miles west of the rim of ancient Salton Sea I heard 
the sweet strains of a new bird song and began to look for the singer. 
I expected to find a mockingbird whose individuality had been developed 
by the desert solitudes and who had learned a new song. On an adjoining 
sand-hill, perched on the exposed tip of a sand-buried mesquite I saw 
the singer, a Leconte Thrasher. Perhaps environment enhanced the 
music, for the spot was a most lonesome God-forsaken one, near an 
1 Condor, Vol. VI., July, 1904, p. 96. 
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