Curve-billed Courtship

Dull brown and yellow-eyed, Curve-billed Thrashers light up the Sonoran Desert

A banded pair of Curve-billed Thrashers with those glowing yellow eyes warming in early morning sunlight after a night that hovered right about freezing.

Curve-billed Thrasher: not exactly a name you’d think of as kind, understated, attentive, partner material. Instead, more like some violent, super-hero, some ‘bad-guy’ character in a DC Comics cartoon; Batman versus The Curve-billed Thrasher.

“Biff! KaBlamm!!! Pow!

Recent encounters in the majestic state of Arizona have taught me to think otherwise…

Most of the Curve-billed Thrashers I encountered a week and a half back appeared during hikes in country that looked a lot like this (above). And they were often hanging out in places like this (below).

…as you can see.

Curve-billed Thrasher pairs mate for life and maintain their territory year-round, usually somewhere between five and ten acres. And to my immense delight, wherever I encountered them this trip they seemed quite consistently immersed in that amorous, courtship, nest building stage, which was a pretty awesome thing to watch.

They are so considerate and attentive of one another.

Occasional, early morning serenades (below), flying together in playful chases, hanging out together, searching for and selecting nesting site(s) together, gathering materials together, then actually constructing the basic nest together before she takes over to line it with soft grass and shape it with her body.

Morning serenade.

This pair seemed well matched and so comfortable together. I got the sense that maybe they’d been together for years.

They even gathered nesting materials together.

In both cases when I was actually able to locate the nest that a couple was ferrying sticks to and building they were pretty well concealed, three to five feet above ground, and well protected within brutally thorny, cholla cactus. I paid a fool’s price to get as close as I did to the first nest, then remembered painfully enough to simply reach out with a telephoto lens a few days later when I came upon the second.

Curve-billed thrashers (Toxostoma curvirostre), aren’t particularly scarce within their native habitat nor are their populations threatened. I’ve encountered them many times in the wild but had never before happened into their vicinity at just this courtship and nest building juncture. I now see them through such different lenses, and my admiration for them has simply ballooned.

Magic. It’s absolutely everywhere …if you’re looking. If you’re willing to say yes.

Curve-billed Thrashers… definitely not flashy, but absolutely fluent in partnership and magic.

This fella, once I located their nest construction site flew up to the top of a saguaro just a few feet from me and stood sentinel. “Don’t mess with my queen.” he seemed to be saying. He stayed there, between me and her for maybe fifteen minutes while she continued to weave in the latest batch of twigs. I loved the show of force.

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