Birds Posters
Thrush
Thrushes are plump, soft plumaged, small to medium sized birds, inhabiting wooded areas, and often feed on the ground or eat small fruit.
They range in size from the Forest Rock thrush, at 21 g and 14.5 cm, to the Blue Whistling thrush, at 178 g and 33 cm.
Most species are grey or brown in colour, often with speckled underparts.
One of the most common woodland birds of the East, the Wood Thrush is best known for its hauntingly beautiful song.
A large and heavily spotted thrush, it is a bird of the interior forest, seldom seen outside the deep woods.
Its susceptibility to cowbird parasitism has made it a heavily studied species.
Wood Thrush is the official bird of the District of Columbia.
The genus name is a direct translation of its common name, derived from the Greek words for woodland and thrush or fieldfare.
The species name comes from the Latin mustela, or weasel.
The Wood Thrush was first described by German naturalist Johann Friedrich Gmelin in 1789. It is best known for its beautiful song.
In the Appalachian Mountains the Hermit Thrush is displaced at lower elevations by the Veery and at higher elevations by Swainson's Thrush.
Poet Walt Whitman considered this bird as a symbol of the American voice, poetic and otherwise, in his elegy for Abraham Lincoln, When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom.
The Dusky Thrush prefers forest, shrubland, and grassland ecosystems, though it has been known to reside in rural gardens and plantations.
The Aztec Thrush is native to Mexico, but has also been spotted in the United States as well.
Between 1996 and 2006, only very few were reported or documented in Arizona.
They are usually seen feeding in choke cherry trees in canyons.
Since then there have been at around 50 Aztec Thrushes in the US, mostly from southeast Arizona (including an astonishing 21 in 1996).
The first US record of an Aztec Thrush sighting came in 1977 in Big Bend National Park, TX.
The next record came from Madera Canyon, AZ in 1978.