Couple things for you to read & enjoy

Thanks to Audubon for letting me do these:

Wilson's Phalarope: The Rebel

John James Audubon: Crazy, Wrong, or Neither?

A Beginner's Guide to IDing Cooper's and Sharp-shinned Hawks

Birds at Large: Teal Owl

People are again clamoring for a crazy-colored owl! Thankfully, Snopes.com is once again on the case.

Back in 2012 I linked to an entry on Snopes.com - the online investigator of popular myths and rumors - about a "newly discovered" "rainbow owl."  It's quite clearly a hack photoshop job, but that hasn't stopped the hordes of blinkered, googling citizenry from making it one of my all-time most visited posts (which, honestly, isn't that hard to do).

But apparently those devious tech geniuses are at it again. Behold, the teal owl!

My goodness! How could this gorgeous species have eluded scientists for so long?? Again, Snopes looked into it and revealed that it's literally the easiest photoshop job.  It's a Guatemalan Pygmy-Owl (here's the original photo from Owl Pages).

Thanks again, Snopes, for setting the record straight.

Breaking Records or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Patch or: A Pedestrian's Guide to the Unspectacular Birdlife of Yards Park, DC

In patch birding, it's all relative.  You're not after huge numbers, you're not expecting rarities. Instead, it's about really knowing a place, and learning its rhythms.  When you're stuck with a patch long enough, you learn to love it no matter how few birds there are.

And there aren't a lot of birds on my patch, Yards Park along the Anacostia River in DC. It's where I walk my dog most every day after work. Despite running along a big ol' river and featuring at least some greenery, I've only managed 62 species despite visiting a few times a week for a year and a half.  I dunno, that's not a tiny number, but it's less than I could get on a decent spring day at a park just up the river. (Also, it's enough to make me the hotspot leader by about 30 species).

But it's what I've got, you know?  And I love it. I especially love it on days like yesterday, a gray and dreary afternoon where I somehow beat my previous dog walking record and saw 17 different species.  Check out that list!  The clincher was a solo mourning dove that cruised overhead when I was back on South Capitol Street, almost home. My dog had no idea what I was yelling about.

Anyway, in honor of my record-breaking afternoon I made a quick. annotated bird finding guide to Yards Park. It's oriented South to North, which is the way I walk it, but it's a little confusing that way. It's displaying small, but you can click to enlarge. Or you can just not do that, and go on with your life.

Black Skimmer and Wilson's Storm-petrel on Audubon Website

I recently posted a couple articles to the ongoing The Sketch series on Audubon.org highlighting quirky, cool birds, this time featuring the Black Skimmer (the only bird with cat eyes!) and the Wilson's Storm-petrel (fishes with its little feet!). Enjoy!

Google Street View Birding: Antarctica Part III: Antarctica

Antarctica. The Great White Desert. The Tundra Down Under. The Big Ice Cube. The Cold-tinent. Ol' Snowyface.  We've finally made it.

Like the polar explorers of old, we've slowly made our way across the stormy seas to our destination. We've seen a lot of amazing things along the way, including endangered wrens in the Falkland Islands and nesting albatross (260 times larger than the wren) on South Georgia and the Sandwich Islands. We've seen adorable seals. And terns. And shags. And weird ducks and caracaras and oystercatchers and geese and vultures and a whole lot of penguins.

We start - led by our intrepid Google Street View friends - at the Antarctic Peninsula, that long point of land sticking out towards South America. We start on a small outcropping called Half Moon Island, just off the mainland of Antarctica. According to the informational overlords at Wikipedia, the 2010 images taken here were the first to put Google Street View on all seven continents. There to welcome them, of course, were penguins.

These are chinstrap penguins, named for the stripe running along their throat that looks like that bad haircut worn by the burnout kid in your 1995 high school class.

Read more »

House Sparrows are Little Troopers

I did another piece for Audubon's The Sketch series, this time about the militaristic tendencies of house sparrows. Enjoy!

Birds at Large: 2013 World Series

How did I miss this?

My favorite team, playing in a World Series game that I 100% watched, and I miss a bird clearly flying behind an outfielder on national TV? I missed it! I am slipping in my old age. I am slipping.

After splitting the first two games of the 2013 World Series, the Red Sox and Cardinals left Boston to play game 3 in St. Louis.  They played a tense game, eventually won 2-1 by the Cardinals after an unprecedented game-ending obstruction call on Red Sox 3B Will Middlebrooks. The Cardinals took at 2-1 series lead but eventually lost to my mighty Red Sox, 4-2.

But something interesting happened back in the third inning of Game 3, something that until now had eluded my knowledge. With one out in the inning, Cardinals outfielder Matt Holliday popped a fly-ball to shallow centerfield off of pitcher Jake Peavy. Red Sox centerfielder Jacoby Ellsbury - soon to depart to the hated Yankees - charged in towards the ball but misplayed it - lost in the lights, most likely - and the ball dropped onto the field. The dutiful Holliday had run out the fly to first, and made a few steps towards second when he saw the ball drop. However, Red Sox second baseman Dustin Pedroia fielded the carom and alertly threw the ball to first, picking Holliday off and rendering moot the error.

Thank you for indulging me in baseball talk.

Anyway, something extremely interesting appeared behind Jacoby Ellsbery in the FOX reply of his blunder: a dang ol' bird.  A bird - a passerine! - clearly flops to the ground right behind Jacoby. Weird, wild stuff.

What species is it, though?

Take a closer look at the GIF above, or go to the 1:30:21 mark on the YouTube video to see the bird flap awkwardly towards the ground and thump down, facing right.

A noted Cardinals fan, the ABA's Nate Swick noticed the bird during the live broadcast and quickly posted to Facebook that the bird looked like a yellow-rumped warbler. Nate was of course limited to the single replay on the live broadcast and didn't have the luxury of an endless looping GIF and YouTube. I don't think it's a yellow-rump.

I wanted to get some experts to weigh in, so I posed the question on Twitter.

Responses were all over the bird. Mockingbird? Redstart? Something?

It's tough to say. Let's think about what we know. First, it's October 27 in Missouri. That's late in the year, after the majority of migration is over. It's also fall, that time of year when migratory birds are drab and there are lots of youngsters around in whatever plumages they might have.

As for the bird itself, it's brownish above and, thanks for some clear image-grabbing from Nate, pretty solidly white below.

Just after this image, the bird banks back and its topside and tail are visible, as shown in the image at the top. The bird appears to have pale greater (and primary?) coverts - though I actually think it's just  a trick of the eye.  In some frames the bird appears to have a pale rump / upper tail coverts, in other frames there appears to be a dark center line to the tail with maybe pale sides, but in both cases the bird shows a very dark tail, even black in the early frames.

So, uh, what the heck is it?

My guess is (drumroll, please) Eastern Phoebe. It generally fits the patterning of the bird in the video: brown/gray above, white below, light throat (best visible in the video when the bird is sitting in the grass), and long, dark tail. It's common in the St. Louis area in October. Also, though I've never heard of this behavior, it's conceivable that, being a flycatcher, it could be attracted to the insects that congregate around bright stadium lights. Maybe?

I'd love to be proven wrong. Go for it. And, go Red Sox!