And the winner is . . .

It's official: Brown Thrasher is #1 on the Birdsong Hit Parade.

This view was ratified this morning by our own resident (we hope) Toxostoma rufum in a virtuoso performance from the top of one of the highest trees around. Let's wish him good luck in finding a mate and settling down to raise some more musical thrashers -- the way the Bach family raised musical Bachs. And safe from marauding cats!

Of course, the notion that the Brown Thrasher is the World's Best Singer rests on a scientist's view of his singing abilities. What are the crucial criteria? It has the largest known repertoire of any song bird; any given Brown Thrasher on a good day can go through more than 1000 different songs before repeating himself. I can confirm that I spent quite a bit of the morning listening to our homeboy songster without hearing a single musical recapitulation.

Of course, each song is usually immediately repeated at least once (sometimes twice and sometimes not at all) before the bird moves on to the rest of its extended repertoire. And the general tone is a bit husky -- without the melodic glow of a thrush or the tonal variety of a Mockingbird. He likes to sit high and broadcast his music over a wide area and these qualities make it fairly easy to identify a thrasher song long before you actually find the bird (hint: look high). In a purely esthetic judgment, the thrasher might not be everyone's #1. Also he is sometimes overlooked because this large, long-tailed, streaked, mimid (relative of catbirds and mockingbirds) has a short singing season -- mid-May to late June or early July at the maximum. The time to enjoy it is now!

The thrasher wasn't the only bird music heard this morning. I had an inquiry yesterday about Tufted Titmouse songs and, since we have a titmouse that sings every morning right outside the bedroom window, I decided to do some avian musicological studies while still in bed! All the guidebooks will tell you that the Tufted Titmouse sings 'peter, peter, peter'. But this bird's principal song consisted of a single note, repeated immediately and obsessively some 40 or 50 times. He then switched to another song, a kind of short glissando or sliding note, also repeated dozens of times. Finally, the classic 'pee-ter, pee-ter, pee-ter' -- a fast two note chant also repeated over and over again. Within his tiny vocal range, titmice (or is it titmouses?) produce a surprising variety of notes. In fact, my rule is that, if I can't identify the call, it's probably a Tufted Titmouse!

The Purple Martins decided that this foggy, cloudy, drippy morning was not a good time to venture out. By the time I got down to the pond, they were all still close to home, continuing their melodious morning communal chatter (martin lovers like to call it their 'morning song'). Since the birds were mostly perched on and around their nesting gourds, I was able to count 27 or 28 birds. Some of the birds may have been inside the gourds (or aways from the nesting area), so I could estimate that the colony holds perhaps 3 dozen birds with the potential for more than a dozen pairs. There is also now a second colony around a smaller collection of gourds hanging near the mouth of Little Weesuck on the opposite side of Weesuck Creek and there is at least one other colony in the neighborhood. Martins like to nest in open areas near water and marsh where there are insects to feed on.

Eric Salzman