Song Thrush with Sound 13cm - Soft Toy

Physical Characteristics
A familiar and popular garden songbird whose numbers are declining seriously, especially on farmland making it a Red List species. Thrushes are plump, soft-plumaged, small to medium-sized birds. Most species are grey or brown in colour, often with speckled underparts.

Habitat
Song Thrushes are found in woods, hedgerows, parks and gardens across the UK - wherever there are bushes and trees to serve as cover and roosts.

Behaviour
Song thrushes tend to be solitary. Territory size varies depending on the habitat, from 0.2-6 hectares, or even more. Most song thrushes in the UK remain in the same area all year.

Breeding
Since the song thrush has two or three broods a year, the breeding season is long and lasts from March to August. The nest, built entirely by the female, is low down in any suitable cover, including trees and shrubs, among creepers on walls, on ledged, and on the ground amongst thick vegetation. It is a neat structure of twigs, grass and moss, cemented together and thickly lined with mud, dung and rotten wood, often mixed with leaves. Normal clutch size is 3-5, with one egg laid each day. The female starts to incubate once the last egg is laid, and the chicks hatch 13-15 days later. Only the female broods the chicks, but both parents feed them. The chicks are ready to fledge at 13-14 days, but if the nest is disturbed, they can leave as early as nine days old.

Diet
The Thrush likes to eat snails which it breaks into by smashing them against a stone with a flick of the head. It also eats worms and fruit.

Strange and Interesting Facts
The Song Thrush has a short, sharp tsip call, replaced on migration by a thin high seep, similar to the Redwing's call but shorter. The alarm call is a chook-chook becoming shorter and more strident with increasing danger. The male's song, given from trees, rooftops or other elevated perches, is a loud clear run of musical phrases, repeated two to four times, filip filip filip codidio codidio quitquiquit tittit tittit tereret tereret tereret, and interspersed with grating notes and mimicry. For its weight, this species has one of the loudest bird calls. An individual male may have a repertoire of more than 100 phrases, many copied from its parents and neighbouring birds. Mimicry may include the imitation of man-made items like telephones, and the Song Thrush will also repeat the calls of captive birds.