Tweeters,

Slowly trying to 'catch up' on Tweeters, I noticed Rob Sandelin's message from a week ago with great questions--to which I have no answer. However, I have been wanting to shout for joy since a Varied Thrush entered our yard on busy Greenwood Ave. just last Friday. This was the first observed visit in a year and a half for what I had considered a regular winter guest. (Perhaps due to the neighbor who moved in with three outdoor cats, causing us to put away our ground feeding platform.) She came in the usual way for the species, from the top of the mountain ash, then, cautiously, down. This bird seems more saavy than the apparent 1st year males I usually see. She watched the jays with much interest and knew exactly what to do with a peanut kernel when she found one. That gone, with a few more berries, she began to tear up the yard. We keep the leaf mulch from the cherry trees and big leaf maple where it falls, and add what falls on a narrow strip of grass. The hungry !
bird tossed aside leaves as big as she. An irritatingly stationary camellia branch, some 8-10" long with leaves intact, was taken in beak and dragged out of the way. For an hour, she devoured all those meaty creatures that inhabit leaf mulch, then she disappeared for a snooze. I thought we'd lost her when Alan went out to feed a squirrel and I saw her shoot past the porch. However, today, after I discouraged a Sharpie from eating our too infrequent RB Nuthatches, she reappeared with the Jays and resumed work on the leaf mulch. I believe it's the same individual because of the color of the supercillium, quite light, almost lemon yellow, and a slim, smart bird that seems aware squirrels forget the nuts they bury and aren't interested in leaf mulch critters. She seems a little alarmed by Rock Pigeons as if she may not be familiar with them, and she appears to think Jays make good nutcrackers.

Patricia Lott

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Seattle, WA
VariedThrush at comcast.net