Ivory-billed Woodpecker in Michigan!!

This is quite sensational, and even though I might just be too late for world-wide fame, I'm not in it for the glory anyway, just for the truth to be revealed!

The Ivory-billed Woodpecker is out there, I have had an encounter, and its range is more extensive than previously (even historically) realized.

It all happened last Friday, September 7th, at the most remote and inaccessible corner of the famous and extensive wilderness area called Ann Arbor's "Arb".
It is actually called Nichol's Arboretum, but we locals call it the "Arb", which is much more creative than "Chock" for Choctawhatchee.
This area is so remote that few will know where it is, so here goes: it extends over vast areas of Michigan's remote South-East, just west of Detroit Bird City.
To get an idea of just how hard it is to even get there, let alone find your way through the Mosquito infested forests without a native guide, read here or take a look at the picture below.

Bayou de Heathdaleview

Anyway, so there I was braving nature's deadliest and working my way through one impenetrable green curtain after the other when all of a sudden, I heard the distinct kent call of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker.
Many people will have you believe it can be mistaken for a Red-breasted Nuthatch.
Utter nonsense by skeptical pseudo-academic pretenders.
My goodness, just look up the call of the Red-breasted Nuthatch in your Sibley guide:

"eeen eeen eeen".

Do you see "kent kent kent"?

I don't see "kent kent kent".

So there you have it, clear proof I wasn't hearing Red-breasted Nuthatches.

Furthermore, the calls differed slightly from the recordings obtained at the "Chock", they were more hoarse, like from an Ivory-billed Woodpecker with a sore throat. This too was a very important and intriguing piece to the puzzle of identifying the calls as belonging to an IBWO, as the Choc recordings differ from the ones obtained in Arkansas and these differ from Tanner's recordings. So all was well.
Of course I immediately lowered my camera and switched it off not to be distracted in case the bird made an appearance and I started to stare in the direction the calls were coming from.

Then, all of a sudden, I saw something big with a white trailing edge to the wing swoop up behind a dead tree and a split-second later, this Blue Jay landed on top of it, seen below.




I presume the woodpecker had mobbed it off the trunk and was now hanging on to the other side just out of view (clear proof of it being an Ivory-bill) while pushing the Jay onto the top perch of the tree as a decoy for naive skeptics.
This has worked quite well in Arkansas and Florida as now the myth has spread that Blue Jays can produce calls identical to Ivory-billed Woodpeckers and this is used as a firm argument of some naive skeptics against the recordings, and the Ivory-billeds are left in peace.
So the appearance of a Blue Jay directly connected to hearing Ivory-billed calls is yet another clear and irrefutable argument for the existence of at least a few pairs of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers along the Huron river in South-East Michigan.


News you can trust, courtesy of yours truly.


Okay, "fun aside" as the saying goes in Germany, here are the facts:

Ever since I started to enjoy watching the Ivory-billed Sitcom about two years ago, I was intrigued by the argument that Blue Jays can utter calls very similar/identical to the kent calls described for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker.
I therefore payed a lot of attention to the calls of the Blue Jays I encountered during the last 10 months in the US and Canada to see if I could hear those calls, but it was not until last Friday that this eventually happened!
As I said, the calls were different from Tanner's recordings, more hoarse and drawn out, but if I was searching some river down South for Ivory-billed Woodpeckers, I would have been slightly excited.

But then again, I might just be a sucker for more hits, and writing about another sexy Redhead would have been quite flat and obvious...

"Perils of Posting Poor Pics", a short comment

Corey over at 10,000 birds recently posted a nice piece on a mystery Calidris sandpiper he saw in August here.
The identification problem he encountered received a lot of attention and even made it onto David Sibley's new blog, as can be seen here.
Corey's main problem was not that he was quite understandably puzzled by the bird out in the field and wasn't able to put an ID on it (like food on his family), but that he reacted to this situation like everyone else today: he digiscoped the bird and tried to identify it later, at home surrounded by all the resources available through today's identification literature and the Internet.
This approach however backfired because many important field marks are not visible on the pictures and it isn't even possible to agree upon the bird's size, a rather crucial first step in the identification of quite a few species.

I found this discussion so interesting as the very same thing happened to me a few years back.
I was out visiting the salt marshes of Karrendorf on the German Baltic sea coast when I chanced upon a strange small Calidris sandpiper amongst a flock of Little Stints and Dunlins. It looked very much like a Little Stint only very much paler and greyer with pale tertials. As I didn't consider the bird to be within the normal range of Littles and as it also was not a Temminck's stint, it had to be a very, very unusual guest that needed to be documented thoroughly.
As time was limited and I had a scope and digital camera with me, I took a few pictures and thought these would be enough to later come to a certain identification.

Well, if Corey thought his images were poor, I hope he does me the favour of NOT commenting on mine, seen below.



Back home I noticed just how excessively lousy my images were, but they still showed the unusual field characters of the bird to a degree I deemed enough to forward them to wader/shorebird specialists, and they even made it all the way to the computer screen of Kilian Mullarney.
Yes, THE Kilian Mullarney of Kilian Mullarney birding fame.

I won't tell you here what he thought of the pic's quality but after a few email exchanges, it turned out that I may have very well seen a juvenile Red-necked Stint, a bird just about as rare in Germany as wild Andean Condors are in Nunavut.
But of course, these pictures were so extremely lousy that there was no way of knowing for sure what the bird's identity was (might have been a strange Little Stint after all), and there was no way of even dreaming to report it as a Red-necked Stint.

Had I not entirely relied on the pics but also taken a pile of field notes with the pictures only as supportive material, who knows, it might have been enough.
But just the pictures?

No way.

So where is the problem with taking pictures and why doesn't it seem to work in so many situations to just take a few pictures and identify the bird later?

There is a very interesting post on the Birdchaser blog here that addresses this problem by discussing the "Birding photo quiz".

I find the comment by Jeff Gyr (he's got a blog as well, here), the first one to Rob Fergus' post, very accurate, and I have taken the freedom of copying one of his sentences here word by word (hope he or Rob won't mind):
"You have to learn how to interpret photographs before you understand how they correspond to reality, just the way you have to learn the way words correspond to things, whether in Spanish or Kiswahili or English."

Pictures don't lie, they always tell the truth: the truth of that particular fraction of a second they were taken in.
But to translate this moment's snapshot into a broader, more generalized truth takes much more because - and this may sound like a simple or childish saying- things are not always the way they seem. They need to be put into a wider context than that which is shown on the picture alone.

Here is an example, a few pictures of a bird taken last May at Ohio's Crane Creek.

The situation is this: we see a somewhat strange warbler hopping through the branches ahead of us, aren't quite sure what it is and just manage a quick snapshot of it taking off.



At home, we analyze the image and note the following field marks:

The tail shows a white centre and a black rim.
The undertail coverts are pale, probably whitish.
The belly appears pale greyish/yellow with a few stripes.
The underwing coverts are dark greyish, leaning towards black, as can be seen clearly by comparing them to the white/pale undertail coverts.

It is a tough bird and we scan through our field guides vigorously and repeatedly but after a while get to the conclusion that the field marks (especially the greyish dark underwing according to the Sibley guide) fit nicely if this bird is called a first spring female Cape May Warbler. A few things don't feel right, but hey, we have the proof right there, don't we?
So this is what we do, we call it a Cape May Warbler, nice bird, we are satisfied and everything is fine.

Well, in this case I was able to take a few more pictures and the next one shows the very same bird a few seconds later:




Oh oh, we were fooled by the light! The underwing sure looked dark under the particular light conditions when the first picture was taken, but this was only how they appeared in that split-second. The true colour is actually a bright white, and by this field character and a few more, we come to a completely different identity: a female Cerulean Warbler.



This is - to most, and my apologies to Patrick - an even more special bird than a Cape May Warbler and a heck of a miss had we stuck with our initial identification as a Cape May.
But as it is such a nice bird, a few photos from last May, also at Crane Creek:



Today's birding community has raised the bar of expectations to prove a rare or unusual sighting quite high by almost demanding photographic evidence. This surely is a good thing and I am certainly not an old-fashioned fart who condemns the possibilities of digiscoping.
In the last few years however, with the possibility to digiscope, I had quite a few potentially "large fish" hooked but then did not manage to pull them onto land (we use that expression in German, not sure if it works in English but presume you know what I am trying to say).

And why?

Because I put more faith in the images I took than in my ability to write a protocol out in the field of what I was seeing.
Or quite possibly, I was just being too lazy... and got punished.

A Change In Plans

I had this one nice post planned, the one with Yellow-breasted Chats, but somehow due to lots of things to do and a few - gasp - birding adventures, my inspiration to this particular post has somehow left me.
But of course a promise is a promise and here we go, I'll write up a short version of what I had planned:

The Ways We Appreciate Birds

May 2005, my birding trip to Ontario and Michigan, was a decadent warbler fest. Indeed the decadence was so profound that I managed to make contact with 36 species of warblers, either seeing or only hearing (two: Prairie and Worm-eating) all of the Eastern warblers except for Yellow-throated (darn, almost got it, missed by a few hours) and Swainson's, the latter a miss easily excused by the scarcity of records north of southern West Virginia.
Wait, that's a cool sentence:
Most Eastern Warblers were seen North of Southern West Virginia.

Ha!

Nevertheless, a few of these warblers proved to be quite difficult to find and it was only after a bunch of death marches through Pelee and Rondeau (sometimes on the trails from 5:30 am to 9 pm with no break at all, not even to eat or drink) that royalties like Connecticut Warbler, Kentucky Warbler and Golden-winged Warbler were tucked safely under my belt.

Another one that went down only after putting up a fierce and long fight was the Yellow-breasted Chat.

That was a tough one, indeed.

At Point Pelee it is readily encountered in the thickets around the old cemetery, and scanning these for the Chat was thus the subject of many bird walks through Pelee National Park. Actually, I went there each day during my stay, which adds up to just about a whole week. On some of these walks, I was fortunate to go birding with no one less than John Haselmeyer himself, and it was due to his expertize that on one of the trips we actually heard the Chat. Being the humble and honest man I am (seriously) I have to admit that John heard the Chat, pointed it out and I heard what he meant, but back then couldn't have told it from a Northern Cardinal or an ordinary Texan Fan-tailed Warbler.
So even though John did his best - which is a whole lot of lots - I wasn't really happy about myself and the Chat.

I gave up.

A few days later I went to Ontario's Rondeau Provincial Park. And there, when I was least expecting it (being more ready for Western Tanagers and Fish Crows), I pointed my bins towards a movement low in the trees, saw something big, yellow below, brown above, black-and-white lores, heavy bill, thought "Wow, the Chat!!" and it was gone.
A few moments later, a large brown songbird with round wings and a long tail quickly flew out of a bush and into the same bush again: my second Yellow-breasted Chat.

Man, that felt good, like the first mouthful of cold beer after a summer day's birding.

What a bird, highly appreciated after such a long search.

But isn't it strange though?
Every bird is a fabulous bird and this is especially true for a warbler. So why did I appreciate this one particular warbler so much more than many others that frankly can easily match a Chat in many aspects, like a Blackburnian or a Black-throated Blue?
Because the Chat made me work hard, it played tricks on me, avoided me successfully and finally seeing it was thus much more than just seeing a new bird species, it was a major success!
I had overcome my own incapability and the Chat's wits and seen it. I win!

This seems to be one of the most dominant ways why we appreciate some birds more than others: by the amount of sweat and tears we have to muster to see them.

Two years later, on a foggy May morning at Ohio's Crane Creek. We had just gotten out of the car at the beginning of the boardwalk when the word spread all the way to us that a Chat was currently being seen about 100 metres away. Well, of course we went there immediately, joined the crowd and after maybe a minute's waiting, the Chat hopped by, as seen below in the two snap shots I managed before its disappearance into the thick bush beyond the parking lot.



And then something strange happened: surely I was happy about having seen it so well, but basically I wasn't too excited! Or at least not more excited than about any other scarce bird around the Great Lakes.

Why?

Because I had seen it before, so there was no victory to achieve, and the looks I had were good but short, so not extraordinary. It was - to sum it up - a nice yet rather normal warbler encounter that left me a happy but not overly excited birder.

Then came the next episode of my Chat encounters, the trip to St. Louis.

This was great: in the course of a single day, I saw a total of 6 Yellow-breasted Chats (in words: six, that's more than 5 and one less than 7, so it is clearly 6 which may not be much when it comes to the flock size of Mosquitoes but is a lot when you're talking Chat).

And by "saw" I don't mean "saw a quick movement in bush" or "caught a glimpse" or "an intriguing and interesting split-second encounter of what was likely..." but I saw them right there, out in the open, sitting on top of bushes, singing away like there was no tomorrow and not minding or avoiding my presence in any way.
Here are a few photos to prove it - and to show I was not bullshipping my readers when I said the mystery bird of the last post was a Chat - and they might still be crappy but they do show a Chat in a small tree out in the open singing along as if there was no ... well, you've read it before, you got the picture, so here are the pics:




And then all of a sudden, those Chats were very special again, and - looking back now - possibly amongst my most memorable sightings in Missouri.

Yet another reason why we appreciate certain birds more than others:
Getting a decent look at what was so secretive before and finally being able to appreciate the bird for what it is and not for how difficult is was finding it.

What Am I ?

A little Mystery Bird Quiz for the Weekend.




No price, but a prelude to a post I have planned for early next week.

Happy birding everyone!

Genesis Of A New Nemesis: the one St. Louis bird that got away

Here we go again - on this last part of my St. Louis travel account - and talk about the Nemesis bird, the one we always miss when all around us they show such a massive presence that other birders are annoyed by them.

I don't think I have a North American Nemesis Bird, yet. I mean, this is a difficult thing to define when you've never seen so many of the region's species.
But now, after my trip to St. Louis and a few birding outings here in Michigan, I have a certain feeling deep down in my guts that maybe, just maybe, I am just experiencing something each birder dreads:

The Genesis of a Nemesis!


For a species to qualify as a Nemesis Bird, two criteria need to be fulfilled:

A) It must be a bird we know from the book and that somehow fascinates us, so we are particularly aware of the fact that we haven't seen it yet and we would really appreciate an encounter.

B) This encounter never comes.


Within the context of this post, here in North America, I am talking about no other bird then the Yellow-crowned Night-Heron.


Here's a bit of a historic background:

When I was a 16-year-old birder, I went to New York City and there I visited Central Park, where I sure got two lifers, Northern Mockingbird and Tufted Titmouse but no Yellow-crowned Night-heron.
When I returned to North America in May 2005, my wife and I went to New York City, this time though we didn't have the time to visit Central Park but had a short look at it from its Southern end.

No harm done...

However, about a year later, I found this post that disturbed me quite a bit.
I had missed it. I had been twice in an area where the species occurs and hadn't realized it. Otherwise, I might have searched for it specifically and - who knows - seen it!

"Oh well", I thought, "there will be other times".

Wait a minute, there had been other times!
In May 2005, while staying at Ontario's Point Pelee, there were reports of an immature Yellow-crowned Night-heron from nearby Hillman Marsh.

Nice.

Of course I went there a few times and saw a huge array of great birds, ranging from a multitude of shorebirds to a flock of majestic American White Pelicans, but despite looking for it specifically, I never located the Night-heron, although it was reported on and off during my whole stay there. I didn't consider this incident to be very significant as there were so many new impressions to be gained, such great birds to see, that missing out on one particular species was something that just happens.
But looking back now, I can't help but wonder...


Then came my trip to St. Louis and of course by now, the Yellow-crowned Night-heron had gained a more dominant presence in my thoughts and wishes. It was not one of the specials I was particularly keen on seeing, as it occurs widely in other parts of the world I hope to one day visit on birding trips, but nevertheless I had decided that I wanted to see this bird this time.

Yes, I did!

The book "Birds of the St. Louis area" had something very interesting to say about the Yellow-crowned Night-heron:

"Yellow-crowned Night-herons ... are most reliably found near Holten State Park..."

So on my second day in St. Louis, on the road to Horseshoe Lake, I payed Holten State Park a visit, just to find it was nothing more but three ponds with a very small rim of trees and vegetation embedded in a Golf Course. To me this looked more like the habitat of European Starlings, House Sparrows and Killdeer than anything else, but hey, I tried.

For about two hours.

In vain.

There was nothing there, not even other species of note.

I didn't even write down anything in my note book.

Too bad.

But then, I thought, I had been there around noon in bright daylight, with the sun blazing down from blue skies. And although Black-crowned Night-herons have a wacky sense of humour, Yellow-crowned Night-herons might not. They might indeed take pride in their name.

It seemed I had missed out once again on seeing that species.

But on the last day, after the Bewick's Wren incident, I unexpectedly got another chance:
My wife was attending the final feast at the end of her meeting, you know, these happenings where everyone is celebrating themselves with lobster and champagne (except for my wife who is a very humble person and just went there for the food and company).
She asked me to pick her up and take her back to the hotel around 9 p.m. (21:00), which was after dark.

Well, I could also have gone for the lobster, but somehow - strangely - decided that this was my best chance yet at seeing Yellow-crowned Night-herons, and off I went yet again to Holten State Park.

I parked my car at a spot that allowed for easy scanning of the ponds and waited for the appearance of the herons.

And waited.

And then decided to wait some more.

But not after I had done some additional waiting.

And then finally decided it was no use and that I just had to wait.


Finally it was too dark to see and I knew another shift of waiting would likely produce the same results: zilch. No Night-herons of any sort, let alone the ones sporting a yellow crown.

I returned to the highway that was to take me back to the city and drove towards the bridge crossing the Mississippi when suddenly I saw three Night-herons crossing the highway, coming (roughly) from Holten State Park heading North.
Now, I don't usually try identifying flying birds when doing 50 miles and hour myself, but these night-herons were strange.
I have seen probably a few hundred Black-crowned Night-herons, many of them as silhouettes in flight, but these looked remarkably different. Although clearly being Night-herons, they showed a stronger curve in their neck and the legs appeared longer, just like a hybrid between a Night-heron and an Egret.

Funny, in a very peculiar way.

Back at the hotel, I checked the Sibley guide and found, to my utter frustration, that the differences I had noticed were exactly what differentiates the flight silhouette of a Yellow-crowned from a Black-crowned Night-heron.

Well, terrific!

I finally got to see likely Yellow-crowned Night-herons and wasn't able to pin down the identification with an adequate amount of certainty. Just what I needed, and thank you very much I am fine, how about you?

Sadly, this is how the last of my St. Louis lifers got away, just before it could be turned into just that: a lifer.


If some of you who are reading this are not entirely convinced yet that the Yellow-crowned Night-heron is starting to evolve into a Nemesis bird, I have one more thing to add:

There have been reports of one hanging around Point Mouillee, a nice wader and shorebird area on Michigan's part of Lake Erie.
I have been there twice now and seen plenty of ... Black-crowned Night-herons. In bright day light.

These are black(-crowned) days ... the rise of the New Nemesis.

Modern Marvels

I am mostly glad to live in a modern, advanced world. Sure, the times when Africa was still largely unspoiled by European "discoverers" were surely nice, or the times when all you had to do every few days was go for a walk with your buddies to hunt mammoths. No office hassle, no stressed out wreckage on a jammed highway trying to make it to work on time and all these other nasty things modern times are tied to. But honestly, could you say farewell to so many of civilization's wonders for the sake of a less stressful life?
And if your answer is yes, how certain are you you're not going to regret swapping with a cave man?

Take, for instance, coffee.

Don't you think those ice age hunters 10,000 years ago would not have liked to sit alone on a hill, wind in their face, overlooking the plains in front of them and then take out their thermos can and have a nice zip of freshly brewed coffee? Sure beats cold muddy swamp water if you ask me.

Oh, but coffee has been around for ages, right? At least in Ethiopia, it's been known at least since the 9th century, so it is not something we can freely attribute to modern times and therefore it is not suitable to demonstrate the advantage of today over yesterday. So wouldn't it be much nicer to live somewhere in the - say - 12th century and have the advantage of drinking coffee plus a general lack of modern nervousness?

Simple answer: nope!

Know why?

Coffee Creamer.

Yes, many of us - possibly even the majority - enjoy their coffee with a shot of milk or cream. And this was quite a difficult thing to do in the times of old. There were no fridges, no cans of condensed milk and surely there was no powdered coffee creamer.
Imagine again those ice age hunting parties: do you think it was practical for them to take a cow along on each hunting expedition? Might have earned them a but too much attention from the local pride of sable-toothed tigers.

No, I tell you, coffee creamer is a true modern wonder that has changed the world.

Here we see a prime example of a classic Coffee Creamer. Small, light, convenient and sure not to turn into cream cheese if you're out in the sun for longer than you had expected.
What an advantage!




But here's the best, if we turn the paper bag around and take a look at the ingredients:




Oh wonderful progress of our food industry! Now we don't even need milk anymore to put some cream in our coffee!

Ain't science something?

There's modern marvels even in the smallest things.

The One I Deserved: The last of the St. Louis lifers

As I have mentioned in a recent post, I prefer to see all the specials of a particular area instead of striving to add as many species to my list as possible, and to me these special bird species - but of course all of them are special in one way or another - are species one is most / only likely to encounter in that one particular area. Now, the Heartland of North America only harbors a limited number of these special birds as most of the local breeding species can be seen further South in winter or also occur at more popular birding destinations.
Let's be honest here, I thoroughly enjoyed Missouri. But once I am back in Germany and birding in North America will mean a somewhat costly holiday, I am more likely to consider trips to Colorado, California, Arizona or Florida (and of course upstate New York) than to, say, Kansas or Iowa.
So now that I was right in the central part of the Continent by lucky chance, I tried my best to see the two birds most special to that particular area. These two bird species can actually be found over much of South-Western North America, but the forms occurring in the central part seem rather distinct and, with today's approach to taxonomy, might be viewed differently in the near future.
Of course I am talking about the eastern/central forms of Bell's Vireo and Bewick's Wren.

Bell's Vireos had been easy enough as the local birder's guide gave quite detailed descriptions to good sites. This was however not the case for Bewick's Wren, and the species therefore was my main reason for temporarily joining the Missouri bird forum and ask for help and assistance.
Sadly I got no response regarding Bewick's Wrens and remained clueless on the morning of my very last day birding around St. Louis.

That's bad.

Okay, I had been given directions to a Western Kingbird and had looked up a nice site for Yellow-throated Warbler and Fish Crow, so I had a few nice plans for the day. However, these were species I could probably encounter in other parts of the country I was more likely to visit in the future, like Alabama's Dauphin Island or California. But the Eastern form of Bewick's Wren?

Very bad, indeed.


Lifer No. 8: Bewick's Wren

So I sat there in front of my laptop in my St. Louis Hotel, ready to hit the road to the Western Kingbird, and knew that I had to make a plan all by myself.

In a last desperate attempt I googled "Bewick's Wren Distribution Missouri" and got to this link.

It clearly had to be the West I should head for, but it didn't look very promising to be right at the edge of its Missouri range, where there had only been between 3 and 5 encounters out of 100 "stops", statistically.

I checked the St. Louis birding guide and the only birding site in the South-West that seemed fit to potentially hold the Wren was ... Shaw Nature Reserve, a place I had been to 2 days earlier.
Therefore, I quickly scanned through the Nature Reserve's checklist I had bought but not read yet and Bewick's Wren was actually listed as an "uncommon" breeder. The fog was starting to clear and I could sense some light.

Now, Shaw Nature Reserve is so small that "uncommon" can't mean anything else but less than a handful of pairs, yet it is big enough to hide these pairs quite well.
I therefore had to get more information on its habitat to narrow down the possible corners of Shaw's Nature Reserve worth searching.
So, again, I returned to this wonderful link and found the following description:

"Open woods, thickets, brushy areas & gardens"

Trying to remember what the different parts of the Reserve had looked like two days ago (and were probably still looking like now), I came to the conclusion that I would spend my last few hours of birding in the woodlands just above the slope towards the lowland forests. Some parts of these woodlands had been cleared recently by park staff in an effort to restore native habitat and I figured that these open scrubby areas were my best bet.
The plan was made:
1. Western Kingbird
2. Castlewood Park
3. Shaw Nature Reserve

After successfully ticking off the first 2 point of my day's checklist I arrived at the parking lot just next to the cleared woodland areas of Shaw Nature Reserve, with about an hour left for birding until I had to return to the hotel.
I surely thought I had a certain chance, but my luck had to run out at some point and I had this nagging feeling Bewick's Wren would be it, the precise point at which my luck was bound to fail me.
First, I walked a short bit to a nice view point over the surrounding areas and scanned for the part I thought was best (seen below on the left).



Feeling satisfied with my choice, I started to walk to the target area, which took about 5 minutes, probably less.
Arriving at the edge of the target area I turned off the main path onto a small track, walked another 10 metres and spotted some movement in a scrubby patch 15 metres away, a brownish and long-tailed bird, surely a Field Sparrow.
I waited patiently and calm (as I always do in situations like these, like any other birder) for about 20 seconds until the Field Sparrow reappeared: dark brown above and heavily barred in parts, paler brown below, whitish supercilium, slender and slightly down curved bill, very long tail with small white tips.

I was left with three choices regarding its identity:

a) the most aberrant Field Sparrow of all time
b) a hybrid between a House Wren and a Gnatcatcher
c) a typical Bewick's Wren

Call me a stringer, but I opted for Bewick's Wren, two of them to be more precise, an adult feeding/attending to a young bird.

This felt good.

It felt very good.

Actually, extremely good.

Here are a few pictures, taken at a considerable distance and heavily cropped, so they are really bad, but they might allow those in favour of a House Wren X Gnatcatcher hybrid to summon more arguments for their case.



And then something remarkable happened. As I was approaching the birds to get better pictures, my camera switched off. I had been so busy birding lately that I had forgotten to recharge the batteries, and right there, in front of the Bewick's Wrens, the batteries were goners.
Now, you might think this upset me, or the fact that I had a Red-eyed vireo perched at eye-level 3 metres besides me for prolongued periods on my way back to the car, but I was actually somewhat happy:
This - the Wren - was a species I had searched for so intensively, wanted to see so badly and felt so happy to see that I really didn't mind not being distracted by trying to get the perfect picture.
Instead, I went for the perfect observation and just looked at it, soaking it in.

What a fabulous bird!