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.
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 .