Mea Culpa

This Fall I published a picture of an unidentified bird, though I think I ventured a couple of guesses, hoping that a reader might have more knowledge than I did.

Shortly after that I was on a web site and knew immediately that the bird that they identified as a Yellow-Rumped Warbler was the bird that I had been unable to identify:

Yellow-Rumped Warbler in non-breeding colors

Of course, in Spring I included several shots of Yellow-Rumped Warblers, the first time I’d ever managed to get a shot of one before.

Yellow-Rumped Warbler in Breeding Colors

It’s hard for me to believe that these could be the same bird, but apparently they are. The one on the top is in it’s winter, non-breeding, colors while the one on the bottom is all dressed up to catch a mate.

Small wonder I have so much trouble identifying birds from birding books, and why more than a few times I’ve just plain been wrong when identifying them.

3 thoughts on “Mea Culpa”

  1. Warblers are the toughest. The boys look different than the girls, the juveniles look different than the grown-ups, and they all change color with the season.

    I usually just save myself the frustration by pretending I didn’t see it.

  2. Identification of these flamboyant males must be very difficulty Loren. In UK if we see a brownish bird and we can’t identify it we note it down as a “littlebrown job” – that covers a whole lot of possibilities.

  3. That must be a universal tendency, pat, as birders here often call them lbj’s, short for “littlebrown jobs.”

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