Mick's age is correct for submission of data to the banding lab, if Linda's bird was banded. It's an After Second Year (ASY) bird. At this time of the year, a Second Year (SY - fledged last year, or 2014) males would still be all brown (unless something pretty unusual happened to the bird causing feather loss). SY males would normally not turn red until the fall molt. Then you would see birds with both old brown feathers and new red ones until molt was completed.
Anyway, Linda's bird is a Purple Finch Dennis----- Original Message ----- From: "Mike Patterson" <celata@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: "OBOL" <obol@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Wednesday, February 18, 2015 7:31 AM Subject: [obol] Re: "which finch" is getting mixed votes
There are some terminology issues that may be muddying the discussion. These terms are only important because they are the terms one is going to have to know to sort through the literature on aging birds and understanding things like molt progression and timing. First, Linda's finch cannot be a "1st year" bird because the photo was taken after January 1st. 1st year (more appropriately hatch-year) denotes a bird in it natal year. All birds magically turn into second year birds on January first. The expectation is that a male second year Purple Finch will look very much like a female through October of its second year. Linda's bird shows quite a bit of red in the head, but is still (probably) too brown. This suggests that it is a transitional bird molting from the plumage associated with the second-year to adult male plumage. We can therefore argue, because it's after January first, that this is a bird in its third year. On the data form we would call this after-second-year. The terminology is arcane and different authorities sometimes use different words. The language presented above is what the Bird Banding Laboratory requires. So, to re-cap: Hatch-year=first-year...(juvenile/1st-basic/1st-winter may also be bandied about, but are plumage/molt based markers, not calendar markers) Second-year... any bird that was HY on Dec 31 becomes SY (or after-hatch-year in birds that do not show unique SY traits) Adult... any bird that has adult plumage. In the case of Purple Finches, we can call males in adult plumage after-second-year, because they have distinctive second-year plumage characters. So, Linda's bird, because of the amount of red in the head, kind of has to be a bird in its third year or older (after-second-year). It is most probably a third-year bird and mathematically about two and a half years old. Confused? Don't be. It's still a Purple Finch. The other stuff will not be on the test. -- Mike Patterson Astoria, OR Problem? what problem? http://www.surfbirds.com/community-blogs/northcoastdiaries/?p=2667
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