Date: Wed, 23 May 2001 14:28:25 EDT Reply-To: Maryland Birds & Birding Sender: Maryland Birds & Birding From: Marshall Iliff Subject: Answers to the photo quiz shot MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Hi all, About a month ago Fran posted some new photos of mine on the MOS website (www.MDBirds.org). Among them was a relatively poor photo of an LBJ that I posted as a "quiz photo", to challenge the identification skills of readers of MDOsprey. Readers of Birding magazine, Birder's Journal, WildBird magazine etc. will be familiar with this sort of photo quiz, which I have always enjoyed immensely and think is one of the more useful tools for learning bird identification. The beauty of a good quiz photo is capturing a bird in an unusual setting or in an unusual plumage or an unusual perspective. In this particular photo, the setting could not have been much more unusual, given the species, which is why I took the photo. If you get as far as the answer and are chagrined that you were lead astray, take heart: this bird was WAY out of habitat perching in a pine tree. Since I freely admit to taking a photo that was intentionally misleading and out-of-habitat, I will dispense with some of the talk about the birds' surroundings that you see in some quiz photo discussions (a type of discussion I dislike...for this very reason). Those that responded to me seemed to be mislead by the setting. Answers I received ranged from crossbill, to Pine Grosbeak to goldfinch to Townsend's Warbler to Sharp-tailed Sparrow. The quiz photo shows a small landbird perching on the limbs of a Virginia Pine tree. It has its back to us and is facing to the left, giving us a view of part of the side of the face. Bill shape is very difficult to discern, but perhaps it appears slightly conical, like a sparrow or seed-eating bird. Relatively few field marks are visible, but this bird is fairly plain-faced with an obvious dark stripe along the crown and a triangular stripe behind the eye. The face is buffy or orangeish. The back is fairly dark with some paler "cornrow" markings. There is a prominent gray nape patch. The tail is short and the tail feathers are pointed. The overall size, shape, and coloration hopefully has led us to some species of sparrow, and the orangeish tones around the face should indicate Grasshopper, Sharp-tailed, or Le Conte's. Grasshopper doesn't show quite so much orange through the face and back, and should have a paler back that is more gray or gray-brown. Grasshopper Sparrow also lacks the contrasting gray nape patch. Sharp-tailed Sparrow is more problematic, since it DOES share the gray nape patch. The back pattern however is not that of a Sharp-tailed Sparrow, which would show a dark back with narrow white longitudinal lines. This is a photo of a Le Conte's Sparrow, photographed at Patuxent Wildlife Research Center (first found by Fred Fallon) in March of 2001. This bird was unusual in that when it flushed, it flew first to this pine tree, then to a wood edge where it perched 25 feet up in Red Maples. Eventually it flew back into the forest interior before returning to the edge and finally flying back down into the grass where it was first found. Very weird behavior. Best, Marshall Iliff *********************** Marshall Iliff miliff@aol.com Annapolis, MD ************************ ======================================================================= To leave the MDOsprey list, send e-mail to listserv@home.ease.lsoft.com with the following message in line 1: signoff mdosprey ======================================================================= =========================================================================