Weekend Birdery: The Chicken and the Brown Thrasher
The state bird of Georgia is the Brown Thrasher, Toxostoma rufum, a member of the mimid family. Like mockingbirds, also in the mimid family, Brown Thrashers are proficient in vocal mimicry. According to the whatbird.com field guide, “Brown Thrashers have the largest repertoire of songs of all the North American birds and are able to vocalize 3000 distinct songs.”
A month or so ago Brown Thrashers were in the news when it was reported that there was a movement to dethrone the thrasher as Georgia’s state bird and replace it with the “Cornish chicken.” It seems the “movement” was more of a publicity stunt—and a transparent one I’d say, now that I’ve seen the videos produced for the “Flip the Birds” campaign website. They’re pretty hilarious, actually.
Of course, that didn’t stop Georgia Conservancy from launching a response campaign to save the Brown Thrasher from Big Chicken. But that’s pretty obviously a joke, too. I can’t help but wonder if both sides—poultry industry and wildlife conservationists—were in cahoots, drumming up attention for each other. Everyone, especially the local media, seems to have treated the whole story as an elaborate vehicle for stupid puns. We at weekend birdery, however, would not dream of ducking so low.
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