Forum birdwatching 2009

[GeeMack]

Still plenty of Bald Eagles in central Illinois, USA. But the Turkey Vultures have returned, so it's about the time for the remaining Baldies to be leaving. We have had a few breeding pairs stick around over the past several years, so maybe we'll be lucky enough to host a few this year, too.

American Robins, Redwing Blackbirds, and Common Grackles are back, too. Some White Throated Sparrows and Northern Juncos are still hanging around, but I don't expect them to be here much longer before heading north.

 

[mummymonkey]

Rather lovely cock bullfinch, Pyrrhula pyrrhula in the garden yesterday. Usually in pairs but this one was on his own.

 

[bruto]

I have a mystery duck. No good pictures yet, because film not finished. A very poor blowup from my 1.1 megapixel digital "camera" gives but a hint. These critters don't seem to be in any of the books. Closest I get is a shoveler, but I'm pretty sure it's not that. Dark body, white chest patch, yellowish beak, dark green head with no neckband. Congregating with mallards, and about the same size, and I would judge similar bills. Note that the chest patch is quite limited, more like a bib. It does not extend beneath. I'm stumped.

any ideas?

 

[davefoc]

Could we get a few more clues?

Where are they?

Do they remain on the surface (dabbling)?

The coloring does look a lot like the shovelers in the wikimedia images:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Anas_clypeata

But it looks like the two or three bill pixels in your image are more orange than those.

I also thought the four or five head pixels in your image looked too green for the northern shoveler.

So my highly uninformed guess, assuming that the bird doesn't fully submerge itself, is that it is some kind of mallard hybrid or maybe a cross between a domestic duck and a mallard.

Head seems about right. Neck is close except for no ring. The bill seems about right. And the mallard/domestic crosses I've seen usually have some kind of random white patches or other strange color patterns in the body.

I looked through most of the images in the anatinae (dabbling ducks) subfamily gallery on wikimedia and I didn't see any that fit better than your northern shoveler idea but I think you're right. I don't think that's it.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Anatinae

ETA: Here's a picture of a mallard hybrid of some sort from wikimedia.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mallard_hybrid.jpg

What do you think?

 

[Rolfe]

Spring is springing away here. I hope the rumours of snow this week were false, as I've had enough for this year. The yellowhammers seem to have taken up residence in my garden - I saw two having a tiff by the bird feeder yesterday, and one perched in a dark conifer tree looked very fetching (I didn't have my camera handy at the time).

Not seen the tree creeper again though.

Rolfe.

 

[bruto]

Could we get a few more clues?

Where are they?

Do they remain on the surface (dabbling)?

The coloring does look a lot like the shovelers in the wikimedia images:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Anas_clypeata

But it looks like the two or three bill pixels in your image are more orange than those.

I also thought the four or five head pixels in your image looked too green for the northern shoveler.

So my highly uninformed guess, assuming that the bird doesn't fully submerge itself, is that it is some kind of mallard hybrid or maybe a cross between a domestic duck and a mallard.

Head seems about right. Neck is close except for no ring. The bill seems about right. And the mallard/domestic crosses I've seen usually have some kind of random white patches or other strange color patterns in the body.

I looked through most of the images in the anatinae (dabbling ducks) subfamily gallery on wikimedia and I didn't see any that fit better than your northern shoveler idea but I think you're right. I don't think that's it.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Anatinae

ETA: Here's a picture of a mallard hybrid of some sort from wikimedia.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mallard_hybrid.jpg

What do you think?

I think the mallard hybrid is probably a good guess, Thanks for the picture. I realize my pictures are a little like one of those puzzle pictures, see if you can identify the object from the minimum pixels. It would help if I were a better birdwatcher, but I often seem to miss the salient features, or forget them because I haven't tagged them with the right terminology.

These ducks were hanging around the thawed-out portions of the waterfront at Burlington, VT, mingling with the mallards, swimming around and also coming out onto the boat ramp where people had left food. They were basically acting as part of the mallard flock, and behaving just as you'd expect mallards ini a public park, so I'm going to go with mallard hybrids.

 

[Rolfe]

Hah. The things you see when you wish you'd bothered to go get your camera before doing anything.... Well, that particular birdie would still have been there when I came back!

I've got a fat ball feeder hanging from my washing line. It's really just a spiral of thick plastic-coated wire, closed at the bottom, and this morning it was almost empty. Of fat balls, that is. What it was full of, was starling.

At first I thought the bird was just in an unusual position on the feeder. Then the more I looked the more I realisd it was in an impossible position. It was lying on its back, right through the feeder, with the feet and tail protruding one side (it was actually hanging on to the wire with its feet, trying to get some purchase to make its plight even worse), and the head and the carpal joints of the folded wings protruding from the other side. The killer was that the head was through one gap, and the wings were through another gap. Not even adjacent gaps at that. It couldn't possibly go back, and going forward only wedged it tighter.

It actually seemed remarkably unconcerned. It was just lying there looking around, and giving the occcasional wiggle. But there was a rook nearby looking mildly interested - or maybe not, maybe I'm reading too much into another random visitor. I really wish I'd gone to fetch the camera!

I went out and managed to manoeuvre the bird backwards enough to get the wing joints wiggled under first one pass of the wire and then a second, so that the wings and the head were actually through the same gap. Then I wrenched the wire apart enough to give it room to wriggle free. It flew off into next-door's garden, apparently unconcerned.

I'd have been really upset if I'd got home in the evening to find a dead bird in that feeder though. Stupid bird-brain.

Rolfe.

 

[amb]

So sorry. Wrong thread. I thought it meant bird, like chicks watching. Never mind. Carry on.

 

[mummymonkey]

My first summer migrant of 2009 is Sand Martin, Riparia riparia.
River Isla, Perthshire 17th March.

 

[bruto]

A new addition to the Vermont duck list: some Ring-necked Ducks, aythya collaris.

 

[bruto]

It's been a ducky week: today a pair of Hooded Mergansers, lophodites cucullatus. Not very common around here, but they obligingly swam around while we fumbled with binocs and bird book.

 

[Kestrel]

Spotted in the Denver, Colorado area today.

Bufflehead Bucephala albeola
Cinnamon Teal Anas cyanoptera
Greater Yellowlegs Tringa melanoleuca
Killdeer Charadrius vociferus
Snow Goose Chen caerulescens
Great Horned Owl Bubo virginianus
Wood Duck Aix sponsa
White-breasted Nuthatch Sitta carolinensis

 

[Kestrel]

Took a walk in the Colorado woods today and found a few more species to add to the list.

Mountain Chickadee Poecile gambeli
Dark-eyed Junco Junco hyemalis
Brown Creeper Certhia americana

The Mountain Chickadee's cousin should have been on yesterday's list.

Black-capped Chickadee Poecile atricapillus

 

[EHocking]

I was surprised to still see Greylag Geese at my local patch in east London last weekend, but upon checking a distribution map, it's seems they're potentially resident in the south-east.

 

[Mercutio]

I may be late, but search does not show them in this thread yet ... The grackles are back! My cats are going nuts at the window. New Hampshire, 22 March. Gobs of them.

 

[bruto]

First Great Blue Heron, ardea herodias, of the spring flew in yesterday. I hope he was wearing skates.

 

[EHocking]

First Great Blue Heron, ardea herodias, of the spring flew in yesterday. I hope he was wearing skates.

I can't see how this would help...




ETA: I've forgotten who's photo this is. It's from our website, but I'm not at my laptop to check the contributor.

 

[davefoc]

First Great Blue Heron, ardea herodias, of the spring flew in yesterday. I hope he was wearing skates.

I saw one visit our local park a couple of days ago. The bird soared in without flapping a wing and landed in a large tree that also had a great Egret in it that has been hanging out in a local park (Clark Park, Buena Park, CA). It was impressive to see this gigantic bird come gliding in over the hundreds of little swallows that were flitting about over the pond.

I got a picture of the great egret eating a lizard. I posted it on wiki commons:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ArdeaAlbaLizard.JPG

This is probably the same bird I got a picture of eating a fish from the pond the other day. Unfortunately the photo quality is a little less than it might have been. One of the things that I have learned about taking pictures of this bird is that I need to stop the camera down a bit. The bright plumage is overexposed otherwise. In this case I just happened along and didn't have time to do anything but put the camera in dummy mode and push the button.

I cropped the image:

 

[davefoc]

Two mystery birds. One that I think I know and the other one that I don't have a clue about.

I've tried several times to get a decent picture of either bird. They are small and shy. So what I have here is about the best that my camera, my skill level and my patience were going to produce.

Bruto might be a little uncomfortable with so many pixels all in one image but I don't think I'll be submitting these images to National Geographic.

Mystery Bird One:

Clues:

1. Orange County, CA
2. Bird fully submerges
3. Somewhat smaller than a coot
4. Extra clue
   Note the stiff tail feathers

Mystery Bird Two:

1. Orange County, CA
2. Bird fully submerges
3. Somewhat smaller than a coot
4. Observed in a group of three or four similar individuals previously. Observed alone when this image was taken
5. Not observed to hang out with any other birds. In particular didn't seem to hang out with ring-necked ducks and was present today when there weren't any obvious ring-necked ducks in the pond.

Mystery Bird Two guesses
1. Ring necked duck female. Problem: It doesn't look like one and it seems a little smaller.
2. Coot juvenile. Problem: I don't know what coot juveniles look like but this seems really different than a coot.
3. Mystery duck 1 female. Problem: It doesn't look like one.
4. Some kind of juvenile. Problem: Which kind?

Mystery bird two really seems like a mystery to me. I've looked at the listed birds for Orange County and didn't see anything like this. And I've looked pretty carefully through all the ducks on Wikimedia and didn't see anything like this. But maybe the identity would be really obvious to an experienced birder.

ETA: I think I figured out what mystery bird two is. It is clearly not a duck which probably was obvious to everybody except me.

 

[EHocking]

Mystery Bird One:
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/imagehosting/56649cc482f5323d.jpg
Clues:

1. Orange County, CA
2. Bird fully submerges
3. Somewhat smaller than a coot
4. Extra clue
   Note the stiff tail feathers

I would say a Ruddy Duck.
ETA: Male, winter plumage.

Mystery Bird Two:
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/imagehosting/56649cc482f69840.jpg

1. Orange County, CA
2. Bird fully submerges
3. Somewhat smaller than a coot
4. Observed in a group of three or four similar individuals previously. Observed alone when this image was taken
5. Not observed to hang out with any other birds. In particular didn't seem to hang out with ring-necked ducks and was present today when there weren't any obvious ring-necked ducks in the pond.

As you hinted at, not a duck but a Grebe. My guess a Pied-billed Grebe