The Networked Bird Observatory Blog

The game’s newest species is American Goldfinch, with a number of shots having been taken between November 24 and November 26. The first identified shot was this one, taken by txbird, with a Chipping Sparrow thrown in for good measure:

I also liked the view of the lefthand bird’s wings in this shot (also with a Chipping Sparrow), taken by idbirds:

I thought this shot, also taken by idbirds, was pretty interesting:

I thought it was interesting because that bit of white at the base of the primaries made me wonder if that was actually a Lesser Goldfinch, rather than an American. (Those two species have always confused me, except for the rare, happy occasions when I’ve had both of them right next to each other on my feeder.) But after consulting my smaller Sibley guide (the big one is at home; I only have the Western guide with me on the vacation I’m currently on), I agree that all of these shots are probably American, rather than Lesser.

Great shots of a great bird! Congratulations to everyone who got a photo.

With txbird driving, a little brown job was photographed in the bare tree beyond and to the right of the pond at 7:27 this morning (oops; yesterday morning, now). I’m pretty sure it’s a new species for the game, though it’s not immediately obvious what species it is. Photos were taken by annelizabeth, loughman1, rafa, txbird, and vanilla, though it looks like vanilla must have subsequently deleted hers. But rafa was clever enough to save all 14 of the original images, and nice enough to forward them to me, so I can display them all in this posting.

There were a number of duplicates (that is, images that were snapped at the same moment by two different players). When I consolidated those, I ended up with 10 images total. I stitched them together into a couple of GIF animations, which allowed me to get a better sense of the bird’s movements (and coincidentally, to shift the frames to compensate for the camera’s pan during the sequence of shots, so the bird stays relatively stationary in the animation).

Here’s my first try at an animation. In this one, each frame takes 1 second:

Here’s a second animation. In this one, I made the pauses between the frames match the (longer) pauses between the actual times when the original shots were taken. In other words, the timing of this animation matches the realtime movements of the bird:

In each case, the shot where the bird is facing mostly toward the camera is the first frame. The shot where the bird has hunched down and looks like it’s about to exit, stage left, is the last frame (though I just made the animation loop continuously). Note also that in the third frame in the sequence, the bird’s tail is partly cut off by the edge of the original image (the camera had been panned to the left). It doesn’t look like that in the animation, because I “cheated” by including the background from one of the other frames, but if you look closely you can see it. I only mention it because I don’t want people scratching their heads over the odd-looking shape of the tail in that one frame.

So, after all that, what do we have here? Speculation in chat covered quite a range, from female Indigo Bunting to Dark-eyed Junco to Ovenbird to Hermit Thrush. Speaking for myself, the first thing I thought was “wren”, and as I scanned through the images I kept hoping to see a light eye stripe that would say “Bewick’s” or “Carolina”. There wasn’t any such eye stripe, as it turned out, but in terms of the overall coloring, posture, and general proportions I really like House Wren. I noticed that birderbf thought the same thing, based on a comment on this image. There are a few shots where I feel like I can see a wren-like beak. At the same time, there’s no apparent barring on the tail, which I’d like to see for a House Wren, though maybe it’s just not visible because of the quality of the image.

loughman1 was leaning toward Hermit Thrush in the chat, and I have to admit that this bird’s coloration and posture both seem pretty good for Hermit Thrush. In looking at the realtime version of the animation, the bird’s sluggishness reminds me more of a thrush than a wren. There’s also that hint of mottling on the throat in the first image — could that be a low-resolution version of a Hermit Thrush’s spots?

One thing that would settle this is size: a House Wren would be noticeably smaller than a Hermit Thrush. My subjective sense of the scale of the image (based on my vague recollection of other birds of known size in that tree) is that this bird looks more wren-sized than thrush-sized, but I’d like to see some comparison shots of known birds in the same location at a similar zoom to be sure. Does anyone know of any such shots?

I guess I’m going to sleep on it and see how I feel in the morning before committing to an ID. In any event, thanks to txbird for finding this great bird, to all the players who got photos of it, and to rafa for saving and forwarding the full set of pre-deletion images. Mystery birds are fun!

Update: ottavia suggested I check out the following YouTube video of a House Wren. She thinks it looks like the mystery bird. What do you think?

Look what showed up today: The game’s first images of what I’m pretty sure are a duo of Chipping Sparrows. Here are three shots, all taken by eyes23blue (txbird also got one shot):

Congratulations, eyes23blue!