Need More Thrasher

You all have good taste.

Who needs a partridge in a pear tree, when you can have a thrasher at a woodrat house?

Because, that fab photo I featured in the last post was just 1 of 46 pics that the cam caught of the Cal thrasher as it, well - thrashed. With some serious head-banger style I might add.

So, let's dig a little deeper with this California character.

A true Californio, the Cal thrasher is endemic to the California Floristic Province, and a permanent, non-migrating resident of our infamously ignitable coastal and foothill chaparral.

Which is where these camera trap photos were captured - in a thicket of chamise, toyon, coffeeberry and yerba santa. And in front of a woodrat stick house.

Here's the front yard in the morning before the Cal thrasher arrived:

That's the entry tunnel to the house up at 2 o'clock.

But the Cal thrasher showed at 11:30am, in the rain, and then spent the next 7 minutes churning up every nook and cranny in search of snacks.

Check out how it digs down with that decurved beak, and turns up the dirt & detritus like a tiller. Including a rock near as big as its head.

A hunter of big insects, such as grasshoppers, beetles and even Jerusalem crickets, the California thrasher also forages fruits & berries, small frogs, lizards & salamanders.

And all are oft found in and around woodrat stick houses. Clever bird.

Our California thrasher is also a species with an interesting collection history.

First documented by the La Pérouse expedition to Monterey in 1786, the ornithologists thought it a type of bee-eater. And never got around to describing it for science. That Jean-François de La Pérouse and his ships disappeared and never made it home to France may have been a factor.

It was collected again by the Malaspina expedition in 1791, drawn by the talented José Cardero, and then described by the eminent Tadeo Haenke - the first PhD to visit California.

Sketches of the California Thrasher by Jean Robert Prévost (left) and José Cardero (right)

But Alessandro Malaspina's strong political opinions and poorly-considered affair with the wife of King Carlos IV when back in Spain - and his resulting imprisonment, exile and death - left most records from his expedition unpublished.

And thus the shy Cal thrasher was once again lost to science.

It took William Gambel, the bird-loving Thomas Nuttall protégé, to rediscover the California thrasher in 1842 and sort out its unusual descriptive history. Which is why he gave it the specific epithet Toxostoma redivivum - "redivivum" meaning "resurrected."