Brown Thrasher

My favorite American bird website says this about the Brown Thrasher:

It can be tricky to glimpse a Brown Thrasher in a tangled mass of shrubbery, and once you do you may wonder how such a boldly patterned, gangly bird could stay so hidden. Brown Thrashers wear a somewhat severe expression thanks to their heavy, slightly downcurved bill and staring yellow eyes, and they are the only thrasher species east of Texas. Brown Thrashers are exuberant singers, with one of the largest repertoires of any North American songbird. They’re most obvious when they sing their loud songs from shrubs and treetops. The song is a complex string of many musical phrases (many copied from other birds’ songs, with each phrase typically sung twice before moving on). They also make a distinctive, harsh tsuck note.

The past two times we've walked our usual morning route, this bird has been singing his heart out from up in the tree tops. His song makes me laugh out loud because he has such a vast and confusing repertoire of bits copied from other birds that he has heard. It's enormous fun to try to figure out who he's mimicking, but so far I'm only fairly sure I've heard Carolina Wren and Northern Cardinal. When I first heard him I thought "What bird is that? And what bird is that? And..." and then I realized, as he went on to mimic about a million weird sounding birds, that it was just the one bird - the Brown Thrasher. And I laughed and looked and looked until I finally located him. His neighbors, the Northern Mockingbirds, also mimic other birds, but their imitations are slightly less odd sounding. But again, when you hear it at first you think "Is that a Wren?" but then you hear a stream of other birds in the exact same spot and realize it's just the one bird.