The species nests in very small numbers in CalIfornia now. Lars
On May 16, 2016, at 11:29 AM, jess crawford! wrote:
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:
My partner and I drove north from Ashland yesterday (returning to our home
in Portland) and stopped to hike/bird at Lower Table Rock just north 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.
It was small -- maybe a little bigger than the nearby Lesser Goldfinches,
I'd say -- and there was not a light patch on it at all. It 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.
The thing we're trying to figure out is that it looked and sounded very
much like an INDIGO BUNTING, but the likelihood of that is so bizarre that
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.
(Other birds spotted during our hike: two LARK SPARROWS, a BLUE-GRAY
GNATCATCHER (many others heard but not seen), an OAK TITMOUSE, many
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
