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calendar   Monday - August 19, 2013

For The Birds

I woke early one morning,
The earth lay cool and still
When suddenly a tiny bird
Perched on my window sill.

He sang a song so lovely
So carefree and so gay,
That slowly all my troubles
Began to slip away.

He sang of far off places
Of laughter and of fun,
It seemed his very trilling,
brought up the morning sun.

I stirred beneath the covers
Crept slowly out of bed,
Then gently shut the window
And crushed his effin’ head.

I’m not a morning person.

Reporting in from Mom’s ... so we’re eating lunch at the dining table, and a little bird lands on top of the window A/C and looks in on us. We’ve always been bird aware here, knowing our finches from our towhees, our warblers from our vireos. But this little fellow we’ve never seen before. OF COURSE I don’t have a picture. He was only there for a second or three, then flew off. But for a small to medium sized small songbird (5"-9", sparrow-ish), this fellow was quite distinctive. He was here and gone so fast that I can’t even describe his overall color, other than this it wasn’t notable. But he had a strong, short, conical bill like finches and cardinals. Except that it was brightly colored, yellowish orange. And he had a red Mohawk. A crest, though it seemed a rather thin one just a single feather wide on the top of his hea. Cardinals and similar birds have a thicker crest; they appear to have nearly pointy heads when seen straight on.
My view was so short that I can’t tell you his body color, although black and white like most of the little woodpeckers could have been. All I had time to notice was the short seed-buster colored conical bill, and the thin but bright red crest that was a very strong contrast to the color of the rest of his head.

We do get blow-ins. Vagrants, accidentals. Birds that shouldn’t be here. And sometimes people catch songbirds and keep them in a cage and later they get loose.

We looked through all our bird books - and in my family, the bird books go back for generations - and found very little. Online, the closest thing I could find was an “illegal Mexican”, the Desert Cardinal or Pyrrhuloxia. A bird more than 2,000 miles out of his natural range. Don’t know. Maybe mom will keep a sharper eye out from now on and get a better look some other day.

Thin red crest. Yellow-orange conical bill. Songbird. Who knows?

We’ve no idea.

image
Pyrrhuloxia, from South of the Border
Red crest, colored beak, insanely far from home

image
Cassin’s Finch, a Rocky Mountain resident
Some bit of a red crest, many younger birds have colored beaks.
This guy is only 2,000 miles out of his range if he’s here


image
Purple finch is from around here, but has more of a head ruff than a crest. And the ruff isn’t high contrast
compared to the rest of his head. And he’s purple, not bright red.

UPDATE: never mind. It’s a young cardinal. They start out rather gray/olive colored, and the red comes in a bit at a time. We saw him again this morning, and had a better look. His crest is still thin, but it’s bright red, and while he’s still growing, he’s cardinal shape. Hardly a bit of red on him anywhere else.
Hey, it’s tough trying to ID juvenile birds.

image

I wonder if cardinals have named stages of development, the way we had names for the ripening of tomatoes back when I worked in the grocery store: green, breakers, turning, pink, red.

A cardinal. Crivens. Common as mud. Nothing to see here, move along.


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Posted by Drew458   United States  on 08/19/2013 at 12:47 PM   
Filed Under: • Animals •  
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