Bird Discovery on Property

The three and a half years we've been up here on the hill, we've seen several bird species we hadn't seen living in town.  So far we've seen and enjoyed watching the Pileated woodpeckers, Towhees, Eastern Phoebe, and now a new bird we needed to identify.

I had to study the momma bird sitting on her nest taking note of her coloring, marks on body, eye color and the shape of the beak.  Came inside and looked it up discovering we have a nesting Brown Thrasher. 

She is this beautiful reddish brown bird (cap, back and wings) with white chest and belly that has these beautiful black marks speckling up and down the front. And her eyes are a bright yellow you can't miss.  From what I understand looking her up, this species has multiple song sounds I believe they pick up from other song birds.  And this bird is a rather large bird compared to other song birds we are used to seeing.

The nest is about eye level (about 5 ft or so off the ground) in a thicket of brambles and a shrub we've yet to identify that has white flowers in the Spring that smell heavenly.  This shrub is leaning up against a fence in our back yard.  Momma will let us walk up but she gets a bit nervous us standing there and will leave the nest diving into the thickets I'm sure hoping we follow her away from her eggs.  From what we've been able to see, the eggs (unsure how many) are a light color......white maybe but a bit hard to tell without stepping on a ladder to see down inside.

Here is a quick sketch as a memory of our discovery.........pen and ink plus watercolor in the Handbook.  Using a Micron 005 and 03.