Sage Thrasher foraging in Hatfield, Massachusetts, March 3, 2021. ©Nick Tepper on eBird. Reproduced with kind permission of Nick Tepper.

One sunny winter day, February 14, 2021, I caught a glimpse of a Sage Thrasher (Oreoscoptes montanus) hopping from branch to branch in a thicket of bushes by a rarely traveled road in western Massachusetts. I had traveled to see this bird after numerous observers had reported sightings on eBird. I remember being struck by the bird’s healthy appearance, even though it had strayed thousands of miles from its normal wintering range.

Sage Thrashers are birds of the western United States and they normally winter in the desert Southwest and northern Mexico, so to see one thriving in the New England winter was a rare experience (Cornell Lab of Ornithology 2019). This sighting led me to wonder first, what caused the Sage Thrasher to migrate east instead of to its normal wintering area? And second, why was it in the habitat where I saw it? To answer the second question, it is likely that the habitat was structured similarly to normal Sage Thrasher habitat. The first question is trickier: Why would a bird risk traveling all that way just to find a habitat similar to that found in its normal range? Is it likely that increasing temperatures due to climate change are now making it possible for a Sage Thrasher to find food and survive through the northeast winter? Or did the bird just make what might have been an unfortunate mistake in direction?