June 7 Mass Murder

Today we spent most of the afternoon at our garden plot at Eagle Heights and watched as bird after bird swooped in, mouth already full of grub, and added to the feast by snatching another worm from our loose soil. We weeded and tilled the last quarter of our plot and early on, a large robin walked over to snatch a white grub from the soil. I counted seven grubs, all the same species, in its beak as it jumped to a fence and squawked at me for getting too close. Later another robin came in and scooped up an earthworm. My picture shows a minimum of five earthworms dangling out the sides of its beak. Finally I watched this brown thrasher (Toxostoma rufum) moving through our neighbors' plot and then stop up on a post. Like the others, it yelled at me for paying attention, even with a mouth full of worms and caterpillars. The Cornell Lab calls them "foxy brown birds with heavy, dark streaking on white underparts". Also distinct is the yellow eye and downturned beak, which makes it seem like they are always staring at you and angry. One of their greatest talents is copying other bird's songs, as well as making up quite a variety of their own. I read that they have been studied to sing over 1,100 varieties of music. That's unbelievable! So, so many worm-like creatures died today at the Eagle Heights gardens, most of them going to bird babies I'm sure, given the way the birds I saw were loading up for big deliveries.