Hate It When That Happens

Every birder makes errors in identification, for a lot of reasons. But nonetheless, I hate it when it happens to me, especially when I do it so everyone knows. In an earlier post I put up some pictures of an alleged hermit thrush. Well, now that I look, it is obvious the bird is a fox sparrow. Still a good bird, but I see them a lot more often than I do a hermit thrush.

All I can say is that it happens to every birder and sometimes the difference is sooooo obvious, I want to smack myself in the head. But I am in good company. We joke at Wild Bird Rescue about our shapeshifting birds on occasion. Sometimes a bird comes in and during intake we identify it as one bird. Later you walk by the cage and it's like you're looking at an entirely new bird, and we end up changing the ID. Of course babies are harder to identify--they sometimes change into a different bird as they grow up and more adult features show up. There just isn't much in the way of baby bird ID guides out there. But that's more understandable than some of the blatant field errors.

Why do we make mistakes? It could be a number of reasons.

• Some birds just look a lot alike. Telling a western meadowlark from an eastern is iffy business if the bird is not singing.
• Sometimes there just isn't a lot of time to make the identification. Trying to identify a sparrow in the nanosecond you see it go from one place to another is a challenge.
• The lighting could be bad and you cannot see colors or identifying marks.
• No bird looks exactly like the field guide shows. That's why many show different views of the bird and most birders have more than one field guide--they all show the bird a little differently.
• Sometimes you "want" a bird and can pick out the field marks you want to see and not see the rest.
• Plumages change throughout the year and sometimes from one year to another.
• Some species have a lot of variation. Red-tailed hawks for example are notorious for the variation in their plumages.
• We're human. We just get it wrong.

So I confess to being human, but I don't have to like it.

Good birding!

Snow Day Feeder Visitors

No surprise that the feeders in the yard have been busy. Although I don't have a good camera and an not a very good photographer, I thought I would share a few photos anyway.


In the first photo you can see some dark-eyed juncos and some house finches in the side area of the yard, picking up seed I scatter on the ground.


When open ground peeks through the snow and ice, there are often special birds coming to the feeders we rarely see. The best bird that showed at my place was a hermit thrush. He came every day, Tuesday - Friday morning. Of course, once the snow/ice started to melt on Friday afternoon, he was gone. I did get a couple of pictures. I wasn't that close and he was in a shady area, but I think if you look carefully you can still make out what he is. The hermit thrush is at the lower right of the next two photos. You might have to click on the photos to get an good enlargement to see well. You can just see the reddish tail in the photos, which was very distinctive.

He disappeared Friday afternoon once the snow and ice melted enough to give him access to the ground again. However, we are due for some more snow tonight and again later in the week, so perhaps he will be back.

Some other good birds not mentioned previously were yellow-rumped warblers and gold finches. Although I generally have some gold finches in the winter, this year they didn't come until the weather got bad.

I went through a lot of bird seed this round. I may have enough for the next front--since Wild Birds Unlimited is not open today, we'll hope so.

Good birding!