This week's #FeatheredFriends contest is to show a bird that you identified. I dug through my photos to try to find a bird that stumped me for a while and gave me a hard time trying to figure out what it was. Here is that bird!
This photo was taken in my first year of birding. I was still trying to learn my different kinds of birds but I had identified over 100 birds that year already. When I saw this little bird above I got excited. I had walked this beach many times but I had never seen a bird like this. I was on a beach on the Great South Bay of Long Island. This bird was flitting along the beach and scurrying around the plants.
At first I thought it was a sparrow. And given the beach habitat maybe it was a Seaside Sparrow or Saltmarsh Sparrow. There is a saltmarsh running up to the sandy beach here after all. But the pink bill didn't fit with either of those species. And its body coloration was off.
Maybe it was another sparrow...I looked through my field guide over and over trying to find this bird but I couldn't figure it out.
Eventually I was forced to post the picture online to a bird ID forum. The people there promptly solved the mystery: it was a Bobolink! Either a female or nonbreeding male. That's why I couldn't find the bird in the sparrow section. Bobolinks are icterids belonging to the Blackbird family.
The reason I found this Bobolink on the beach was because it was a migrating bird on its way south. August is the start of passerine migration which I didn't know at the time. It was my first fall migration. Bobolink's usual habitat is pasture and fields like where I found these Bobolinks years later:
I'm still trying to get a good shot of a male Bobolink in breeding plumage. This is closest I've gotten. But they are truly remarkable looking birds as they fight and sing amongst the tall grass on a summer's day. Their song is especially cool, it is like a glitching robot. 🤖😁
So I guess my tip would be to ask for help when you can't figure a bird out. And to think outside the box in terms of what plumage to expect. Maybe post your mystery birds to this community and we can help! That's my bird ID story for today.