The TL;DR answer is that it’s a curved bill thrasher.

So who calls it an echobird?

We do.

Obviously.

Gentle sarcasm aside, sit back for a short story about the eponymous echobird.

Terra McKeown, the taller of the Echobirds, tripped over a threshold at a retreat where ze met and fell head over heels for Kat Heatherington. Fast-forward a half-dozen months and ze U-Hauled from the drippy, verdant Pacific Northwest to end up for the first time in a land lacking the water ze was submerged in for a handful of decades. Not that ze missed it: Terra wanted to live in Albuquerque, New Mexico with Kat.

It wasn’t a real U-Haul, though it did happen pretty fast. Kat had an intentional community/farm at the time, and Terra – both tired of living in Seattle, and having a private practice – thought it would be much easier to pack that up than six people, lots of animals, and about four acres of land. Terra landed in Albuquerque in February 2016 and settled into a casita in the Southeast Heights of the city. For the next five years Kat and Terra split their time between the farm and the city.

Very quickly, though, they started hearing this bird. TWEET-tweet. TWEET-tweet. Terra and Kat looked and looked for the creature making this echoing call. Kat lasted longer at that – Terra wasn’t nearly as interested in finding out what kind of bird this was. But Kat couldn’t find the damn critter, no matter how hard she looked.

One of Terra and Kat’s good friends, Brian, had done bird rehabilitation and was very good at identifying birds! So we contacted them to help us figure out who our backyard resident was, hoping that they’d settle the mystery for us. Or, Kat was more attached to finding out; Terra didn’t really care, it was just a pretty noise.

Well, they should have known that Brian was pretty tired at this point of providing bird identification for friends – over text, especially. They sent resources, and despite lazily going through these, Kat and Terra never did identify their backyard neighbor.

So it became the echobird.

Years passed. When sitting together in the casita, the two would hear the echobird and they’d smile, point it out to each other, as if it were a sign. It was love. It was home. It was a future together.

Finally, in 2019, Terra and Kat were in the backyard, probably taking care of chickens or somewhat, and then in the cholla near the wall, we saw the culprit! Medium sized, compact, with a dusty gray-brown coloration and bright yellow eyes. Its long, elegantly swooping maw opened and…

They had seen it! And then they saw the other one hopping amongst the spiny cactus. Both birds perched in the spines, telling each other, quite redundantly, a something that only birds can translate. But again, it was love. It was home. It was their future amongst the spines, the rocks, the sun and the desert air.

Spotting them was the first step, but then finding out about the Merlin app (https://merlin.allaboutbirds.org/) got the results we needed: a curved bill thrasher! We knew who our neighbors were, and we were as in love with them as before!

Of course, echobird just sounds better.

Fast forward to 2022 and Kat and Terra are wracking their brains for a name for this small imprint that they created. What to call it? Writing and reading to us was love. Home. A future together.

And Echobird Press just sounded better.