Thanks, Alan! If not for location we would have felt pretty sure it was the
Indigo Bunting, but I didn't feel confident enough to officially "call it"
without knowing how unusual their presence would be.
On Mon, May 16, 2016 at 11:22 AM, Alan Contreras <acontrer56@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
This is perfectly plausible. In a typical year two or three Indigo
Buntings pop up in Oregon.
Alan Contreras
Eugene, Oregon
acontrer56@xxxxxxxxx
On May 16, 2016, at 11:14 AM, jess crawford! <librarianjess@xxxxxxxxx>wrote:
home in Portland) and stopped to hike/bird at Lower Table Rock just north
My partner and I drove north from Ashland yesterday (returning to our
of Medford. On the descent, we got a good, if brief, view of a very
interesting blue and black bird, singing from the top of one of the low
trees nearby. I got maybe a 10- or 15-second view of it before it flew
away. Back at the car, we discovered we could not for the life of us
determine what it had been.
Goldfinches, I'd say -- and there was not a light patch on it at all. It
It was small -- maybe a little bigger than the nearby Lesser
was almost as if you took a goldfinch and changed all the yellow to blue.
Blue throat and, I think, completely blue breast; black wings; maybe black
head? Essentially the same shades as a Steller's Jay, except clearly not
one. It had a long-ish, sort of finch-like song.
much like an INDIGO BUNTING, but the likelihood of that is so bizarre that
The thing we're trying to figure out is that it looked and sounded very
I thought I'd see what the OBOL folks here had to say. We have been birding
for a few years and generally feel confident in our ability to ID birds,
but this one has us stumped. It was so striking that we're frustrated we
can't figure it out! I wish I had a photo or a recording, but we don't
really have the setup to capture either of those things.
GNATCATCHER (many others heard but not seen), an OAK TITMOUSE, many
(Other birds spotted during our hike: two LARK SPARROWS, a BLUE-GRAY
VIOLET-GREEN SWALLOWS, a ton of TURKEY VULTURES, and what from a distance
looked quite like a RED-SHOULDERED HAWK.)
Thanks for any input!
Jess
