The Varied Thrush ( Ixoreus naevius ) is a striking bird known for its distinctive plumage and preference for mature, moist coniferous forests. Observing these birds in Pacific Northwest yards, parks, and natural areas is a treat, especially during the fall and winter. Understanding their diet is key to attracting them to your yard and supporting their populations, which have unfortunately experienced declines in recent decades.
What Varied Thrushes Eat
Varied Thrushes have a varied diet that changes with the seasons.
- Summer Diet: During the breeding season, their diet consists primarily of insects and other arthropods. They forage on the ground, consuming beetles, ants, caterpillars, crickets, snails, earthworms, spiders, and other invertebrates. They often toss leaf litter aside with their bill as they search for insects.
- Winter Diet: In the fall and winter, berries and wild fruits make up the majority of their diet, supplemented by some seeds and acorns. They may feed on berries either in trees and shrubs or after they fall to the ground. Typical fruits they consume include snowberry, apple, honeysuckle, madrone, mistletoe, manzanita, toyon, ash, salal, cascara, dogwood, blueberry, huckleberry, salmonberry, and thimbleberry.
How to Attract Varied Thrushes to Your Yard
Attracting Varied Thrushes involves providing food sources and habitat that cater to their preferences.
Food Options
- Bark Butter Bits: Jim's Birdacious® Bark Butter® Bits are bite-sized nuggets made of rendered beef suet, soy oil, roasted peanuts, corn, oats, and calcium carbonate. These can be easily offered in tray, seed tube, and hopper feeders, attracting a variety of birds, including those that don't normally visit feeders.
- Mealworms: Mealworms, the larvae of the beetle Tenebrio molitor, are a favorite among birds like chickadees, bluebirds, wrens, and woodpeckers. Varied Thrushes also enjoy them. Place mealworms in a feeder where they cannot crawl out. Mealworms can be stored in bran flakes, wheat bran, or corn meal in a container with air holes, kept at 40 - 50° F. Add a potato or apple slice for moisture.
- No-Mess Blend CC: This blend features seeds with their shells removed, making it 100% edible and tidier for feeding. It includes sunflower chips, hulled white millet, cracked corn, and shelled peanuts, appealing to birds that feed at the feeder or on the ground.
- Suet: These birds also like suet.
Creating a Suitable Habitat
- Native Plants: Include native plants that produce fruits, nuts, or seeds to provide additional forage. If your yard was historically forest, grow the trees that likely once grew there to provide food and roosting or nesting sites.
- Ground Cover: Varied Thrushes forage on the ground, usually under dense cover. Providing areas with leaf litter and dense shrubs will encourage them to visit your yard.
- Water Source: While not directly related to their diet, providing a source of fresh water can also attract Varied Thrushes.
Other Considerations
- Window Safety: Be sure birds can see your window glass, not a reflection of the sky! Window strikes are a significant cause of mortality for Varied Thrushes.
- Predator Control: Protect birds from domestic and feral cats.
- Feeder Placement: Use an EcoTough® Covered Ground Feeder to protect the birds and food from the elements. The perforated metal bottom keeps the seed dry and lifts out for easy cleaning. The removable screen bottom is treated with EcoClean® Antimicrobial Product Protection.
Varied Thrush Habitat and Behavior
The Varied Thrush prefers dense, mature, unfragmented moist coniferous forests (fir, hemlock, spruce, with a dense understory). Its breeding range extends from Alaska to California, inhabiting forests dominated by coastal redwood, Sitka spruce, red alder forests, western hemlock, western red cedar, western larch, or Douglas-fir. In winter, it may be found in a broader range of habitats, including parks, gardens, lakeshores, and riparian areas where fruit and berries are abundant.
These birds forage on the ground, periodically moving to higher perches in the understory to sing or move between foraging sites. They may use their bill to toss leaf-litter aside as they search for insects.
Read also: The Hermit Thrush's Diet
Males arrive at the breeding grounds before females and start singing to establish territories. They have several threat displays, beginning by cocking the tail, turning it toward an intruder, and lowering the wings. If the adversary remains, the displaying bird will face off, lowering its head, raising and fanning the tail, and spreading its wings out to its side.
Nesting typically occurs 5-15' above the ground in a conifer, usually at the base of a branch near the tree’s trunk. The nest is a bulky open cup of twigs, moss, and leaves, lined with softer materials such as grass. The female lays 3 - 4 pale blue eggs that are dotted with brown. She incubates the eggs for about two weeks. Both parents feed the nestlings.
Conservation Status
Varied Thrushes are fairly common, but populations have declined by approximately 0.7% per year, resulting in a cumulative decline of about 32% between 1966 and 2019. Logging and forest fragmentation can cause habitat loss that reduces their numbers. Around human habitation, Varied Thrushes are very vulnerable to window strikes as well as predation by domestic and feral cats and collisions with cars.
Identifying Varied Thrushes
When fortunate to be seen, it is not easy to miss this bird with its distinctive plumage: bold black, blue-gray, and orange. Look for an orange eyebrow, wide black collar, orange underparts, blue-gray back and tail, and orange wing-bars. The female and juvenile are similar in color to the male, but duller and generally lacking the wide black v-shaped collar.
Read also: Wood Thrush Feeding Habits
Read also: The Hoxsey Diet