Oct 30 2009
Remote Bird Identification

Because I like birds, people often describe a bird they couldn’t identify and ask me if I can tell them what it was. This week a request from my sister had me stumped for a while.
My sister’s house overlooks a salt marsh in coastal Virginia. From her back windows she can see a host of birds I never see at home: bald eagles, osprey and great egrets, to name a few. Mary isn’t a bird watcher but sometimes she sees something unusual and asks me what it is. This week she wrote: “A large bird – like a goose - I don’t know – has been hanging out at our marsh for the past 4 weeks by himself and he is all black except for under his tail or wing. Mom and Dad saw it yesterday and didn’t know what it was either.”
Based on that description I sent her some photo links of brants and greater white-fronted geese. She wrote back, “Nope isn’t that…I looked again with binoculars (wish they were stronger but they are not). It has a long neck like a swan. Black except white under its wings. Beak is reddish.”
There are no black swans native to North America but they do exist in southern Australia. I wouldn’t even know about them except that they’re sometimes imported to adorn man-made ponds and I’m familiar with a small flock at the water hazards of the Ponderosa Golf Course in Hookstown, PA. Google and Wikimedia came up with this picture. I sent it to my sister and she replied, “100% YES!”
What will happen to this bird? Who can say? He’s alone, imported from a remote place, and probably escaped from his former life as a pond ornament. His large size protects him. A salt marsh in southern Virginia where it rarely snows is probably just fine for the winter.
And for me? Another victory in Remote Bird Identification.
(photo from Wikimedia Commons, in the public domain. Click on the image to see the original)
equal one of these
We’ve had a spate of hot, humid weather that’s finally going to break this weekend. I shouldn’t complain – after all it’s August – but I’m no lover of heat and humidity and my nose tells me it’s time for a change.
When Chuck Tague sent me this picture of a
I had her, but what I hadn’t counted on was that she had me… as you shall see.
For those of you following
For the past three days – maybe longer – there’s been a blue budgie at my backyard bird feeder. She has a small blue/gray band on her left leg and looks like the bird in this Wikimedia picture except she has pale skin above her beak. I’ve read that males have blue ceres and females have pale ones, so I am guessing she’s a female.
Everything is connected to everything else. What happens when one part gets damaged?

