Month: July 2012

I’m certainly not a good enough birder that I can immediately identify all the birds I see while out birding. In fact, I identify an awful lot of them after I have the picture open on the computer. That’s the way I learned to identify most of the birds I can readily identify.

Here, however, is a bird I’ve been unable to identify despite spending several hours online and going through my apps. I found it in the Malheur wetlands and knew immediately that I’d never seen before.

I saw a single bird on a post,

so I assumed (perhaps mistakenly) that it was a young bird wanting to be fed, particularly when it called out to another bird flying by.

The birds were obviously chasing insects as they flew back and forth. occasionally hovering in one spot.

The birds’ distinctive wing shape

made me think that it would be easy to identify, but it hasn’t been. Hopefully a reader who is a birder will be able to identify them for me.

John and I have gone to Waughop Lake trying to get pictures of American Coot chicks without much luck, so I was pleasantly surprised when I saw chicks of different ages at Malheur.

This one

is a good example of a very young chick. It strikes me as being so ugly that it is cute. I remember being shocked by its appearance the first time I ever saw one.

Although this one looks more like the adult, I don’t know I would recognize it as a coot if I hadn’t seen it with a parent.

This one

is clearly a Coot, but I wonder where the white front came from since neither young chicks nor adults have it.