Four in One!
Besides kicking the rest of our butts in scoring, and posting awesome shots to the blog of his own backyard birds, noho_bird_club got this fun shot earlier today:
It looks fairly ho-hum at first, but when you give it a careful look you realize that he’s got no fewer than four identifiable species in one shot! Going from left to right, there’s a female Lesser Goldfinch upstairs on the thistle feeder, a male House Finch downstairs, a Chestnut-backed Chickadee at the bottom of the sunflower feeder, and a male House Sparrow in the ball.
I know there are lots of two-species shots, and there probably are a bunch of threes, but four is very impressive. Can anyone find any previous shot in the system with four different species in it? Could there even be a five?
Sounds like a fun project for an evening when the camera is dark. 
In the meantime, congratulations noho_bird_club!
Update: I went back through the past week, and at least going back to Saturday, June 2 (which required paging through 68 screens of thumbnails, at 16 images each, for a total of 1081 images), I couldn’t find any shots containing more than two species. We’re all so obsessed with zooming in for tight close-ups lately, we don’t often pull back for the wide shots that could show a bunch of different birds at the same time.
Then, taking a hint from kryptonkay, I tried looking through all the disputed shots. Though there were a lot with two species, I couldn’t find any with three. But that reminded me of the great shots we got of the Lazuli Bunting back on May 9, and I checked those out to find this shot of kryptonkay’s, with the bunting, a male House Sparrow on the lower left, and then a female Black-headed Grosbeaks on the top and a male (I think) on the lower right:
So there’s at least one with three species in it. Still haven’t been able to find another one with four.
June 9th, 2007 at 8:12 pm
All we have to do is go to the disputed birds and you’ll find more than one species. I try to say what bird to ID when there’s more than one species. That helps and we’ll have less disputes .