Wheeler Wildlife Refuge Association - WWRA

Our Wildlife of the Week is the Brown Thrasher, a striking songbird known for its bold patterns, expressive yellow eyes, and powerful vocal talents.

About the size of an American Robin, the Brown Thrasher stretches roughly eleven inches in length with a broad, rounded tail and a slightly downcurved bill. Its upper body is a vivid, bright cinnamon-red, complemented by two white wing bars. Below, its cream-colored chest is heavily dotted with dark brown teardrop streaks. Its staring, bright-yellow eyes give it a distinctively stern expression.

As an omnivore, more than half of the thrasher's diet consists of animal matter. It primarily feeds on insects and invertebrates—including beetles, caterpillars, grasshoppers, spiders, and earthworms—by sweeping its long bill side-to-side to uncover prey among leaf litter. It rounds out its diet with fruits, seeds, berries, and acorns, and will occasionally eat small frogs or lizards.

Brown Thrashers thrive in dense cover. They prefer thickets, forest edges and overgrown clearings. Because they spend most of their time close to the ground, they rely on heavy undergrowth to keep them hidden while foraging.

They form monogamous pairs for the breeding season. Courtship involves the male walking around the female or offering her twigs and leaf pieces. Both parents build a bulky cup nest made of twigs, leaves, and bark fibers, usually hidden low in dense shrub, vine tangle, or low tree. The female lays 3 to 5 pale blue, speckled eggs. Both parents share incubation duty for about 11–14 days. Chicks leave the nest remarkably quickly—often in just 9 to 13 days—to escape ground predators.

Brown Thrashers can be found at Wheeler in all four seasons. They are commonly seen and heard darting through the refuge’s brushy forest margins, shrubby wetland borders, and tangled bottomland hardwoods.

Fun Fact: It has one of the largest vocal repertoires of any North American bird, capable of singing over 1,100 to 3,000 distinct song types. You can tell a Brown Thrasher's song apart from its relative, the Northern Mockingbird, by counting its repetition: while a mockingbird repeats its musical phrases three or four times, a Brown Thrasher almost always sings its notes in paired phrases

(Photo by Tom Ress)

Wow!

The Bird Migration Highway the entire eastern United States is full speed ahead south with over 525 MILLION birds now on the move!

Cooler Canadian high pressure is driving the migration out of Canada ahead if incoming rain into the Great Lakes region.

More migration through Alabama now!

It’s that time of year! Monarchs are on their way through Alabama.

Our Wildlife of the Week is one that is migrating through the refuge now--the Monarch Butterfly. This butterfly is famed for its striking orange-and-black wings, distinct life cycle, and extraordinary multi-generational migration. It is perhaps the best-known and most loved butterfly.

Before it achieves its full adult splendor, the monarch is a boldly striped caterpillar with bright black, yellow, and white stripes. During this 10 to 14-day growth stage, they feed exclusively on milkweed. Fully grown monarchs drink nectar from a variety of flowering plants, such as coneflowers, asters, goldenrod, and milkweed.

Monarchs execute a massive 3,000-mile journey each fall from southern Canada and the northern U.S. down to the mountains of central Mexico, returning northward over multiple generations every spring. At Wheeler and throughout North Alabama, monarchs are typically seen twice a year:
Spring (Late March to May): Moving north to lay eggs on emerging milkweed.
Fall (Mid-September through October): Moving south toward Mexico. Peak migratory movement across Wheeler NWR generally occurs in late September to early October. So now is the time to get out and look for these brilliant butterflies flitting through your garden!

Adult Monarch Butterfly and caterpillar photos by Tom Ress.

Fun Fact: Monarch caterpillars eat toxic milkweed leaves to store cardiac glycosides inside their bodies. This chemical makes both the caterpillar and adult butterfly foul-tasting and poisonous to birds and other predators!

A bird showed up at the refuge this week that caused a lot of excitement. A Roseate Spoonbill was spotted wading in the pool at the Observation Building and is our Wildlife of the Week.

The Roseate Spoonbill is a large, flamboyant wading bird that looks like it stepped out of a storybook. Adults feature brilliant pink body feathers accented by deep carmine-red shoulders and a crisp white neck and upper back. Their iconic feature is a 6-to-7-inch long, flattened, spoon-shaped (spatulate) bill. Breeding adults have a featherless, pale greenish-gray head with striking red eyes. Juveniles look paler and have fully feathered white heads. They stand roughly 2.5 to 3 feet tall with a wingspan exceeding 4 feet.

They wade slowly through shallow wetlands, keeping their bodies horizontal while sweeping their semi-opened bills from side to side. Using sensitive nerve endings in their bills, they detect and snap up small fish, shrimp, crabs, crayfish, and aquatic insects. Their signature pink coloration comes directly from natural pigments found in the crustacean-heavy diet they consume.

Spoonbills are serially monogamous, meaning they choose a new partner each breeding season rather than mating for life. Courtship includes ceremonial stick-passing and bill-clasping. They nest in dense colonies alongside other waders like herons and egrets. The female builds a bulky platform of sticks in trees or mangroves using materials brought by the male.

Females lay 2 to 5 white eggs speckled with brown. Both parents share incubation duties (around 22–24 days) and take turns feeding the hatchlings.

Wheeler is far outside the bird's normal territory. Roseate spoonbills are primarily coastal specialists, native to coastal marshes, mudflats, and mangroves along the Gulf Coast (such as Texas, Louisiana, and southern Florida), the Caribbean, and Central/South America. While young birds occasionally disperse inland during late summer post-breeding wanderings, northern Alabama is too far north and inland for regular visits, making a sighting at Wheeler a rare and exciting event.

Roseate Spoonbill photos by Tom Ress.