Song Thrush

Distribution

The song thrush breeds in most of Europe (although not in the greater part of Iberia, lowland Italy or southern Greece), and across Ukraine and Russia almost to Lake Baikal. It reaches to 75°N in Norway, but only to about 60°N in Siberia. Birds from Scandinavia, Eastern Europe and Russia winter around the Mediterranean, North Africa and the Middle East, but only some of the birds in the milder west of the breeding range leave their breeding areas.

Diet

The song thrush is omnivorous, eating a wide range of invertebrates, especially earthworms and snails, as well as soft fruit and berries. Like its relative, the blackbird, the song thrush finds animal prey by sight, has a run-and-stop hunting technique on open ground, and will rummage through leaf-litter seeking potential food items.

Information

The song thrush (as represented by the nominate subspecies T. p. philomelos) is 20 to 23.5 centimetres (7+3⁄4 to 9+1⁄4 inches) in length and weighs 50 to 107 grams (1+3⁄4 to 3+3⁄4 ounces). The sexes are similar, with plain brown backs and neatly black-spotted cream or yellow-buff underparts, becoming paler on the belly. The underwing is warm yellow, the bill is yellowish and the legs and feet are pink. The upperparts of this species become colder in tone from west to east across the breeding range from Sweden to Siberia. The juvenile resembles the adult, but has buff or orange streaks on the back and wing coverts.The most similar European thrush species is the redwing (T. iliacus), but that bird has a strong white supercilium, red flanks, and shows a red underwing in flight. The mistle thrush (T. viscivorus) is much larger and has white tail corners, and the Chinese thrush (T. mupinensis), although much more similar in plumage, has black face markings and does not overlap in range.

Song Thrush

Other birds