Ciblek Mania

Man, if we could only see the feet, this might be a cinch! But of course they are obscured.

So let's move on to the other field marks. Looking at the small bill and overall shape we know this is a warbler, right? Good. What else do we notice?

Well, if you remember your Streaky Fall Warblers chapter from Identify Yourself: The 50 Most Common Bird Identification Challenges (please see page 296) you'll remember that we divide the confusing fall warblers into Streaky Fall Warblers and Plain Fall Warblers. This little dude is definitely streaky.

The Streaky Fall Warblers include magnolia, pine, Cape May, blackpoll, bay-breasted, and prairie.

The "maggie" has a necklace, a dark head, and a yellow rump, which this bird lacks.

The pine is a super-chunk bird with a stout bill. Again, not our bird.

The Cape May is dark above, pale below, with dark face, and a limeade rump. Nope.

The prairie is very yellow below, with noticeable white tail panels, which it shows off by flicking its tail. It also has a very obvious yellow face, with a yellow crescent below the eye. Our bird's face is olive.

OK, look at the eye on our bird. See how it has a dark line through it? That's the line that makes the blackpoll look "mean" while the eyeline-free, plain face of the bay-breasted looks "sweet."

A streaky back. OK that narrows things even more. Wing bars? Good to note, but that doesn't get us much closer to an answer.

Non-uniform underparts: pale throat, yellow breast, streaky belly and flanks. Now that's notable. If this were a bay-breasted warbler, the underparts would be uniform. And the flanks might show a hint of the "bay" or chestnut color. But this bird has plain flanks.

So this bird, a Streaky Fall Warbler, is a blackpoll warbler. Oh, and the clue about the feet I mentioned at the outset? Blackpoll warblers show yellow feet (and often yellowish legs). But that's a field mark that can be difficult to see on a tiny, flitting migrant. So start with streaky versus unstreaky, and go from there.

Get it? Got it? Good!

Three weeks ago, I was up in the Indigo Hill birding tower with our friend Nina who was visiting from the southwest corner of Ohio. We were chatting as we watched birds zip through the trees, and across the sky. It was not yet peak fall migration, but there was still enough to look at that our conversation kept getting interrupted by birds that required a glance or two before an identification could be placed on them.

As birds appeared and I called them out, Nina would politely ask me about certain details of the birds' field marks. Lucky for me, she was asking questions for which I had accurate, easy answers. This served to make me feel like I was helping a fellow birder along the path to bird identification enlightenment. It was satisfying.

Oh but pride doth come before a fall. And it being fall, I was about to take a serious fall in terms of my bird ID skills and reputation.

A falcon hove into view, pumping hard from over the old Morganstern place, headed south-by-southwest toward us. It was a half-mile away when I spotted it and it looked big and strong. But what caught my eye first was how hard it was pumping its wings. "This could be a merlin" I said to Nina.

The bird tacked a bit east of its path to avoid a clump of tulip trees. This put it against a stark milky-white background of high clouds. "Might be a peregrine!" I said with more excitement, because to my eyes (which were suddenly on fire with Falcon Fever) the bird now looked worthy of consideration as a larger, more powerful falcon. I had shifted my ID hypothesis from merlin to peregrine.

The falcon slowed its pace, flared its wings and tail and began to glide in a circle. As it turned, it showed (or at least I thought I saw) dark wingpits. "NO WAY!!!!" I shouted to Nina. "There's NO WAY this could be a prairie!" Perhaps the most reliable field mark for a prairie falcon is its dark wingpits. This species is seen irregularly at The Wilds, about an hour's drive from our farm. So this species could be possible, but far less likely in southeastern Ohio than a merlin or a peregrine.

At this point I was insane with Falcon Fever. I SO wanted this to be a good bird. Somehow, I remembered to grab my camera and take some photos of the falcon, which by now was much nearer. It was using the heat rising from our ridge top to gain some soaring altitude. snap-snap-snap-snap. I got image after image.

Up and up the falcon went, into the milky overcast. As it rose, it drifted farther south and was soon out of sight, headed toward the West Virginia hills.

At no time did I reach a final conclusion to the bird's identification. It had flown rapidly with strong wingbeats like a merlin. It had looked large when it first started soaring, like a peregrine. It had shown dark wingpits, like a prairie falcon. What the heck WAS this? I knew I'd gotten some images, so we watched it disappear over the ridge to the south of us, and we headed down from the tower to look at the images and sort out this bird's identity.

As soon as I saw one of my later images, with the bird's wings and tail flared for soaring, I had a hunch that I'd been fooled. Fooled? Yes, fooled.

It was a large, immature, female American kestrel.

The strong wing beats? They could have been those of an inexperienced flyer. But it had flown like a merlin, and looked like one when I saw it head on, coming at us.

The dark wingpits? Perhaps a trick of the light, or a symptom of Falcon Fever?

The large apparent size? That came from its age and gender—young raptors are often larger than their parents after leaving the nest. But it also came from the White Sky Effect. This unofficial phenomenon is well known among birders: Any bird seen against a background of bright overcast or white sky can appear much larger than it actually is. I don't know any of the science behind this phenomenon—it could be all bunk for all I know.

But I also know that it's easy to blow a bird identification, even under ideal viewing conditions. It's one of the things that keeps us humble as bird watchers. And it's also one of the things that keeps me coming back for more. Because every so often you actually get a hard bird identification right, and that feels really good.

I am now under doctor's orders to watch first, remember the obvious, and speak only after a moment or two of quiet reflection. It is hoped that this will cure me of Falcon Fever.







I know some of you are saying to yourselves, "Bill, there's nothing in these photos that says ANYthing else, but kestrel." And you'd be right. But you had to be there to catch the fever like I did! It's not the first time I totally blew a call and it surely won't be the last.

Special thanks to Nina of Nature Remains, for not going "Haa-haa!" like Bart on "The Simpsons" when we discovered how utterly wrong I was about this bird. And to Zick, who DID say "Haa-haa!" But only after first trying to convince me that this was just a big, young kestrel. I should have listened.

And now back to our mystery duck in North Dakota....

We watched the mystery red-billed duck for 20 minutes and during that time it became increasingly wary, it seemed—moving to the far end of the small lake and swimming into the thin vegetation there, as if to hide. We noticed that a female lesser scaup was with this apparently male bird, but we had no explanation for the weird color on his bill.




Through my spotting scope, despite the wind and distance, we could see that the red-orange on the bill did not appear to be blood from an injury. The color was wrong.

When you are in the field (and far from your reference library of field guides) looking at an odd bird, it can be difficult to remain calm and rational. Your heart starts pounding, your eyes get big, and your brain, which has been running on 1/3 power for most of the day, suddenly finds the energy and enough working synapses to leap to some spectacular (and usually wrong) conclusions. Surely this is something fantastic—a first North American record! Or at least a first for the continental U.S. You'd even settle for a first state record for North Dakota...it's GOT to be at least that good.

Soon the bird was too far away for reliable views, so we headed down highway 36, headed west into the coteau. But we kept debating our ideas and impressions about this bird. We felt reasonably sure that this bird was a scaup or a scaup relative. I had a feeling this was a regular lesser scaup with some sort of physical anomaly or, perhaps, some sort of bill marker placed there by a researcher. Julie was not giving up on the fact that this could be either an escaped bird from an exotic waterfowl facility or zoo, or a true vagrant that ended up far from its normal range. Secretly, I wanted her to be right because it would be so much cooler if the bird turned out to be something from far away.

A few things bothered us about my assumption that this was just an odd scaup. First of all the bird looked duller in color than the other male lesser scaup around it. Secondly, its head shape was flatter and less pointed than other males we could see. This made the head/bill shape look more canvasback-like than scaup-like. Thirdly, it behaved weirdly (swimming with its body and head low to the water, as if in a submissive pose) when several other male scaup approached it and what we assumed was its/his mate.


It was all too much to let go unresolved. We made a point to return to the same pond on our way back to Jamestown after our route-scouting trip was done. Five hours later, about 4 pm, we pulled over alongside the road to scan the pond that, earlier in the day, had held the weird duck. There were scaup there, but none with an orange-red bill. Where was it? Had we let the discovery of a lifetime slip away? Had we let a species new to science (Thompson's scaup or maybe Zickefoose's pochard) flap away on the cool prairie wind?

Tune in tomorrow for the rest of the story...

During our Washington County, Ohio Big Day, the Whipple Bird Club was fortunate enough to see BOTH species of yellowlegs. Not only that, but as we were discussing the finer points of telling greater yellowlegs from lesser yellowlegs, the birds obliged by standing next to each other in perfect profile for a few moments.

This really gave us a good look at the key field marks: the differences in bill length and size; body size; leg length; and plumage markings on the flanks (of the greater).

It might make birding less challenging, but wouldn't it be great if more birds cooperated like this? I'm talking to YOU sharpies & Coops, scaups, peeps, empids, chickadees, shrikes, ibises (ibi?), and most of the dang sparrows!