February 2009 – Page 3 – Seabrooke Leckie

Summer colours

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Harris’s Three-Spot (Harrisimemna trisignata)

One of the advantages of having multiple different projects on the go is that if you start to feel weary with one, or are waiting on something before you can continue, or just need a change of pace, you’ve got several other things to turn to that will still keep you busy. This morning I pulled out my paints for the first time in perhaps six months or more. Now that the warbler drawings were all wrapped up, it was time to sit down with the blackbirds. I had been procrastinating on getting started because I didn’t have a good workspace downstairs in my living room cum study. I finally got around to rearranging things a bit and moving my drafting table down from Dan’s studio (neither of us wanted to work in the same space, for a number of reasons, and since I spend half my time at the computer and he has more need of the extra space, he got the second bedroom). I’m thinking I might take some photos of my works-in-progress and post them from time to time. I have 55 blackbirds to paint between now and July, so much of my time will be occupied with that, I suspect.

Scarlet-winged Lichen Moth (Hypoprepia miniata)

However, prior to that, while I was procrastinating, I turned to the moth book to do some work on that for a while. One of the things that I’d been meaning to get to for a while was organizing and labeling my moth photos. I had a collection of 374 unidentified/unlabeled images from the warm weather (how long ago that seems right now!), and I’ve been whittling that down, slowly. And that’s just the photos I took since moving here. I have an additional 762 photos from my parents’ old place and Toronto. Because the whole point of my friend and I doing this book is that there isn’t a good easy reference guide currently out there, progress has been slower than I might like. I’ve gone through and identified and labeled 125 so far. Just a thousand left to go!

Imperial Moth (Eacles imperialis)

But boy, going through those photos really brought back the warm summer evenings, the stars glowing overhead, the still, humid air, the crickets chirping in the grass, the moths fluttering at the porch lights. The delight in standing on the deck, looking over the creatures drawn to the light, discovering something new, something interesting, something colourful. The expectation as the top of the moth trap is opened, a hundred soft little bodies clinging to the egg cartons inside, the excitement over unusual finds. The tediousness of taking them out of the fridge where they had been held, chilled to keep them calm, and sitting them on a leaf to have their photo taken. Over and over. Hm.

Brown Scoopwing (Calledapteryx dryopterata)

I am full of anticipation for those first mild evenings in early April, perhaps even late March if we’re lucky enough to get an exceptionally warm spell. What plans I have for those evenings. My lamps are carefully tucked away, my white sheets lie folded, my trap is disassembled and stored in the garden shed. But come April they’ll all be brought out, dusted off, and, hopefully, drawing in the moths once again. What mysteries will the lights reveal this year, in this new location?

Beautiful Wood-Nymph (Eudryas grata)

By the end of the warm season, it’s easy to begin feeling tired out with a subject, to have difficulty maintaining interest and excitement over such a long period. I feel guilty, in the fall, for choosing not to put my light out on a nice evening, or grab my binoculars and go birding on a warm afternoon, but eventually one begins to burn out, the flame that burned so strongly and brightly in the spring finally running out of fuel, flickering and sputtering reluctantly. However, nothing like five long, dark months of cold and snow to renew the fuel banks for the flame. After five months of limited activity, this pony has been confined inside far too long, she’s champing at the bit, eager to get out and stretch her legs.

Light Marathyssa (Marathyssa basalis)

In the meantime, to get me through the remaining six weeks of winter, I browse through my photos, basking in the memories of warmth and sunshine and verdent green foliage that they conjure. I came across a photo I took when we first moved here, a view of our house from the dock, the trees so lush and green you can only see the top where it peeks out above the leaves. Sapphire blue sky, clear cool water, lilypads and a hammock.

Black-and-yellow Lichen Moth (Lycomorpha pholus)

It seems we’re always looking ahead to the next season, always waiting for that next exciting thing, so often we forget to stop and enjoy what’s here right now. There is magic to the snowy landscape, the crystal ice sheaths wrapped around the trees, the frost on the windows and the crunch underfoot. I appreciate winter, sure. But as much as I see the beauty in the cold season… how can you not anticipate spring?

Large Tolype (Tolype velleda)

Now I know why they call the firemen out

It’s good to be fat

Dan took advantage of the wonderfully mild weather we’ve been enjoying the past few days to open our feeder net to band some birds. Dan obtained his Master bander permit back in the fall, with the intention of undertaking a number of studies in our area. One of them was to look at the demographics of our winter bird population. He explained it in this October post, excerpted here:

The project will be initiated to benchmark the demographics of birds inhabiting this particular neck of the woods during the cold months (November-March). Data on abundance, diversity, survivorship, condition, and age/sex will be gathered to index and monitor the health of resident bird species in the area. These kinds of projects are important, particularly today with the threats posed by climate change to the ecology of even the most common bird species.

So we set our net up, situated near the feeder so that birds coming or departing hat the chance to be caught in it. Over the course of two hours in the afternoon we caught and banded 33 birds. Most of these were the redpolls and siskins coming to the nyger feeder. We had a lot of chickadees, those boldest of the feederbirds, first to find new seed sources. We also happened to catch our Red-breasted Nuthatch, as well as a White-breasted Nuthatch and a Hairy Woodpecker, all nice birds to see in the hand, although Hairys, with their strong beak designed for drilling, can really do a number on a bander’s hands.

The last couple of days we’ve seen a lot of our banded birds at our feeders, not the least put off by the whole experience. For most species, banding is a mild inconvenience. It takes them out of their routine for a short period, but generally doesn’t result in any ill effects, providing the bander is conscientious and doesn’t keep them longer than necessary. In the winter, this means speedy (though still careful!) work, since the birds need to spend most of their time eating or looking for food, to maintain energy levels. Good thing our net is right next to our house – not only can we keep an eye on it and go retrieve a bird as soon as it’s caught, but we can also transfer them indoors for quick banding.

One of the things banding can tell us is how many birds we have in our area. Banding of course can only sample a portion of them, but the premise of mark-recapture studies is that if you mark a set of individuals, and then measure how many of them appear in subsequent samples, you can extrapolate the size of the population. For instance, if one marked and released 100 fish, and then came back and took a bunch more 100 fish samples, of which there was an average of 10% marked fish per sample, you’d know that your original 100 fish represented about 10% of the total population – which was, therefore, about 1000 individuals.

Similarly, we banded 33 birds a couple days ago. In watching the feeders since then I would estimate that between 1 in 8 or 1 in 10 individuals was banded. Through extrapolation, that would mean that our 33 birds represented between 10% and 12.5% of the total number of birds visiting the feeders, which would mean a total of between 264 and 330 birds coming to our seed. No wonder we’re going through it so quickly!

Another measurement that one can take from birds in the hand that’s impossible to get with simply observing birds in the trees is how much fat they’re carrying. This is extremely important simply for assessing health (for example, a Boreal Owl up near Ottawa a couple weeks ago had looked fine in the tree, and had even been seen with a rodent, but was found dead a few days later and was severely emaciated – a fact that was hidden by its feathers), but it also tells you a lot about their travel plans.

Birds only lay down fat if they’re migrating. You and I and Fido lay down fat as a security against lean times, but wild birds are always on the move, and their metabolism is too high to accumulate much if any fat during regular activities. This is especially true during the breeding season, when they’re busy collecting food for all their young as well as themselves, but it’s also true in the winter, when keeping warm requires a lot of energy. Come spring and fall, though, their daily time budgets change. While flying during migration there’s no opportunity to eat, so they need to make sure they have enough energy stored to get them through the long haul to their next pit stop. This is done in the form of fat.

Birds have translucent skin, and because their feathers grow in tracts, rather than uniformly, it is possible to part the feathers between the tracts and look through the skin. The fat appears yellowish or orangeish beside the red tones of the muscle, so it’s easy to see how much fat a bird has put on. Extremely fat birds are probably preparing to depart in the next couple of days. Birds with just a little bit of fat are either residents that are finding so much to eat they are actually storing a bit, or, more likely, are migrants that have just arrived, having exhausted all their fat reserves in the just-completed leg of their trip, and haven’t had a chance to put more fat on again. They may stay for four or five or more days while they do this, and they may need to do it a dozen or more times over the course of their trip.

The Hairy Woodpecker had no fat. This was no surprise, since we would expect him to be a permanent resident. The same was the case with the nuthatches. The siskins and redpolls all had fairly heavy fat deposits. They may start to peel out over the next week, to be replaced, perhaps, by birds moving in from farther south. But the ones that surprised me the most were the chickadees. The finches are irruptive birds, they don’t breed around here, so we would expect them to be leaving. But chickadees do breed here, so it was a surprise to discover them all with full fat deposits as well.

Dan and I actually noted that there was a recent influx of chickadees at the feeders, and it was hard to tell if they were just birds that had exhausted their winter food caches and were now relying on the feeders, or what the story was. The banding data, however, may provide a clue to the answer. Chickadees, in years of high summer breeding success and low winter food availability, will irrupt south just like redpolls and other winter birds. It may be that the chickadees we have at our feeders, fat as they are, are irruptive birds that had come south back in the fall, spent the winter, and are now preparing to head north again. It could be that they either started coming to our feeder in order to more easily and quickly build up their fat stores prior to departure, or that they are birds from further south who have just arrived and are stopping to fuel up before their next leg.

Since they can’t tell us, we can only hypothesize on the reason. However, we can see, come spring, just how many banded chickadees we still have coming to visit the feeder then.

January thaw in February

It was a lovely day out today, sapphire blue skies, warm golden sunshine, the snow melting into little rivulets of water along the road, the smell of spring in the air. I was hearing recently that this is the first year in a while that we haven’t had a January thaw, and that January misses having one in only one year in ten. This would be that one year, I guess. Or, perhaps, our January thaw just came a week too late to count.

I walked Raven up the road and down the next, over to where it severs Canoe Lake from Eel. I’m not convinced that these two lakes weren’t at one point, decades ago, a single body of water. These days they are joined by just a single outflow from Eel, a metal conduit that channels the water under the road and down a short run of rocks into Canoe. The separation between the lakes isn’t much more than a causeway, at its centre not much more than a foot above the water level. I suspect the road floods in spring.

With the warm weather, the flow of water had opened up a large pool in the ice cover of Canoe. The mouth of the conduit has been open all winter, but during the coldest days it was only a foot or two wide. Now it’s several meters across, perhaps ten or more long. Ah, it’s good to see open water again. I imagine the waterfowl are thinking the same thing. It’s been a tough year for ducks and geese as even Lake Ontario was freezing up more than it usually does.

Speaking of birds, this past Thursday I and the Bird #93 went up at Vickie Henderson Art. Head on over and check it out!

It’s still winter, though. Aside from the snow on the ground, the sun is still sinking below the treetops by mid-afternoon. This photo was taken at 2:30pm. Five months from now, the sun will still be hanging high overhead at 2:30. It’s amazing how much the sun swings back and forth in the sky over the course of a year.

Back in December I had to be heading out with Raven by about 3 pm if I wanted to get back in before it started getting dark. Now I can leave it till nearly 4:30 (which is a good thing for my productivity, since I don’t have to interrupt myself if I get into a groove). I’m looking forward to sunset being after 9pm in a few months.

On a different note, my mom started following a few blogs last year, and has recently been inspired to start up her own. With the move to the new house, and now that she’s mostly settled in, she felt the timing was right. It’s a glimpse of life on a hobby farm in rural eastern Ontario. She’s named the new place Willow House, and so these are the Willow House Chronicles.

The first glimpse of wet earth I’ve seen in a couple of months. Calling it earth is being generous. Although we weren’t here last spring, I have a feeling that the packed dirt of these roads will become thick mud once the snow really starts to melt.

Over on Facebook I was tagged a few times by others to do a “25 Random Things You Didn’t Know About Me” meme. Despite writing in a personal tone here on the blog, I haven’t talked a lot about myself. I thought my readers here might find it interesting to learn a little more about the person behind the keyboard, so I’m sharing it here, too.

1. I have a Facebook account, and I generally accept friend requests from everyone who friends me, but I don’t use it as a social networking tool all that much. More often I use it as a handy contact list for people whose email I don’t have. And to see how all those people from my past are doing now. But mostly I use it to play Scrabble (aka Wordscraper for legal reasons). I’m always up for a game if you are!

2. I have never been a very social person. I like small groups – one on one with friends is best – and am usually very quiet among larger groups. I tend to be very shy in new situations, but especially with people who are older than me or in positions of authority. I am also usually too shy to make the first overtures to potential new friends or romantic interests (at least the latter isn’t a concern these days). For this reason I rarely take the initiative to add new friends on Facebook or such things.

3. I blame this shyness on my pre-teen school years. From about age 9-13 I was the kid that got picked on by everyone else. It was enough of a torment to me that one day my mom even let me stay home from school because I couldn’t bear going. It took me a while to build up my self-esteem following that, but I think I’ve mostly recovered. :)

4. I suspect kids picked on me both because of my unusual name, my coke-bottle glasses (this was before featherweight lenses had been invented) and my smarts. I was the only kid from my school that was invited to participate in the “gifted” program. Not a good thing when you’re pre-teen, though I enjoyed my time in it anyway.

5. I love my name now. I get a lot of compliments on it. I’m the only first-name Seabrooke I know. When people ask my name and I answer with “Seabrooke”, they often ask, “And what’s your first name?” Seabrooke is a fairly common last name. It’s originally Old English for “the brook by the sea” – unsurprisingly.

6. I was the narrator in my kindergarten play because I was the only one who knew how to read already. I have to credit my mom with my love of books and reading – she taught all us kids how to read before we went off to school, and continued to encourage us later.

7. I don’t read nearly as much as I would like to anymore. I could happily spend the whole evening, every day, curled up with a book, and heaven knows there are enough on my shelves waiting to be read to keep me occupied for a while. Seems like there’s always other things that need doing, though.

8. My favourite authors are Scott Weidensaul, Tim Flannery, David Quammen, and Bill Bryson. I love the non-fiction combination of interesting science with travelogue, which these guys all do exceptionally well. Interestingly, they’re all men. I know of very few women who write these sorts of books.

9. When I was in high school I had originally planned on becoming an architect. When it came time to go to university, I ended up in zoology. Through university I thought I’d become a professor. When I couldn’t secure any scholarships for grad school, and couldn’t find a prof to take me without one, I shifted my focus into doing fieldwork researching birds. After five years of trying to cobble together enough jobs to make a working year (tough in the winter when the birds have all flown south), and often having to travel to find a job in my field, I began to want to settle down. So my career direction changed once again.

10. However, I hate offices. I hate the 9 to 5, the having to go to another location to work, having no control over your surroundings (offices are always too cold, regardless of season), having to book time off to take your pet to the vet or go to the dentist, having to either pack lunch or eat out. I have always been firm in my resolve that I would hold out against an office job for as long as I could. Self-employed was the way to go, even if it meant a little less security.

11. To that end, I started investigating ways to make a living that didn’t involve going to offices, or travelling to work for someone else. A friend of mine, who was an illustrator, had a couple of leads on bird illustration projects that he passed on to me and I took. I then ended up convincing this same friend to partner on a field guide to moths, which we managed to land a good home for last year. The success with landing the moth field guide encouraged me to follow up with the possibility of doing other writing projects. I am now working with the agent who represented us on the moth guide to develop an idea I have for a second book. I’m beginning to envision my future long-term career as a writer.

12. This brings me back to #8. Someday, eventually, I would like to write the sorts of books that Scott Weidensaul et al do. It would be a dream of mine to be considered among the ranks of my favourite authors. And as a woman among men.

13. As for other random stuff about me (it is supposed to be 25 random things, after all)… I played tenor sax until about grade 11, when I decided to take a trumpet home for the weekend and teach myself, because a guy I really liked played trumpet. I started on trumpet in the next week’s band practice and never did return to tenor sax. I ended up dating the trumpet player. And I played trumpet right through my final year of university, long after we’d broken up. Unfortunately, I haven’t played it since. It’s a tricky instrument to play by oneself, but see #2 above regarding joining a local band.

14. Probably some 20,000 individual birds have passed through my hands since I got into bird banding in 2003. These range in size from the diminutive Ruby-throated Hummingbird all the way up to the bulky Red-tailed Hawk. I’ve banded about 120 species of birds from both sides of the continent. Most banders complain about grosbeaks and cardinals, whose seed-crunching bill can deliver an awesome bite, but the one I like handling the least is the cowbird – they seem to have all the crunching power of a grosbeak, but with a little narrow bill to amplify the pain, the way pulling just one or two hairs on your head hurts way, way more than if you grab a fistful.

15. I have visited many places, including the Pacific Northwest, the Great Plains, the Great Basin, the Sonoran Desert and other parts of the temperate northeast. My favourite place, however, was undoubtedly the rainforests of Ecuador, where I spent two weeks as part of a university course. I’m scheming on how I can get myself back there. Also to the southeast – I’ve never been south of D.C. or east of Arizona (though I apparently visited New Orleans before I was born) – and to eastern Canada. And to the territories. And just about anywhere overseas.

16. I spent one summer during university working for a professor of mine. Half of it was spent plucking and counting flowers from teasel inflorescences. The other half was spent assisting his grad students with their fieldwork – on honeybees. I learned how to smoke and open a hive, and pull out combs to look for marked individuals. The first few outings wern’t too bad. We wore bee suits. However, the bees would still sting if they got caught in a fold in the fabric. And as the summer wore on I got increasingly phobic about it, to the point where I was only good for the first five minutes. Once the bees were all up in the air and we were sitting in the middle of a swarming mass, I would be bordering on having a panic attack. Even though the bees were generally fairly docile unless they got pinched. Eventually I was pulled from that fieldwork because I stopped being a helpful worker. ;)

17. I can’t stand the smell of frying mushrooms. I’m also not a big fan of eating them. Or tomatoes (except as sauces). Or seafood (except canned tuna). However, I do really like brussel sprouts. And peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches.

18. Despite all the photos of Raven on my blog, for the longest time I was very much Not A Dog Person. I grew up with dogs, but the last one died when I was around 11 or so, and my family never replaced her. I had some bad experiences with dogs (bites), and poorly behaved dogs that jumped and slobbered and barked incessantly and stuck their nose in your crotch (a problem particularly for women). Then I watched The Dog Whisperer. And it suddenly became clear that it wasn’t that I didn’t like dogs, it was that I didn’t like bad dog owners. And that the power was all in my hands for shaping the dog’s behaviour to what I wanted it to be. I may be a little biased here (the way a mother is about her kids), but Raven is the best dog I’ve ever known.

19. I’m still a cat person at heart, though. If I could only have one animal to live with, it would be a cat. Growing up, over the years, I lived with about a dozen cats. Only one lived to a ripe old age of about 19 or 20. Most were outdoors cats that disappeared after a couple of years to either coyote or cars (my parents’ cats are all indoor cats these days).

20. I drive a standard transmission car. My sisters and I were all taught to drive on our family’s two automatic transmission cars, but when I was in university my dad bought a standard. We learned to drive it, but it took a while for it to grow on us. Now, all three of us girls own standard cars. They’re cheaper, use less gas, and are a bit more fun to drive. Unless you’re in traffic jams a lot.

21. I’ve driven my car across the continent to the west coast. Three times. By myself each time. My longest day in the car was a 16-hour day on my way back from a work stint in BC. It was the last day of the trip, and I just really, really wanted to get home after being gone for two and a half months, so I pressed onward. I was so glad to get out from behind the wheel at the end of that day. My car doesn’t have cruise control, so I ended up spending about half the time with my left foot on the gas pedal to give my right leg a break.

22. I’ve been to only two weddings – my only older cousin’s and my best friend’s – and have never been to a funeral. My dad’s father died when I was about 8, but my parents didn’t take us kids. I find it remarkable that somehow in three decades I’ve managed to avoid having anyone else really close to me pass away. As for weddings, there was a period in high school, when I was convinced I was eventually going to marry my boyfriend of three years, that I was afraid the first wedding I’d attend would be my own. (Obviously that didn’t happen.)

23. My favourite colour is red. Through to about high school it was blue. Then sometime in high school it became red. Without reading too much into it, that was probably about the same time that I started getting some real friends and opening up and coming in to myself. I’m not sure what specifically triggered the change in preference, or if there even was a trigger.

24. I am afraid of the dark. I have trouble stepping outside at night even to grab a couple logs of wood from the woodpile without my chest clenching up. Those nights when I’d walk home from babysitting for the neighbours were awful (we were in the country, so no streetlights), even though there was nothing to rationally fear. I’m gradually getting over it as I grow older, but it still helps to have Raven or someone else out there with me.

25. Ironically, I am a night owl. With no schedule and no alarm clocks, I have a tendency to stay up well past midnight and sleep in till well after the sunrise in the morning. I do my best work in the evening hours. I find myself often too distracted during daylight hours to work efficiently. I would like to get up earlier in the morning so I can enjoy the bird activity, but unless I am getting up for a purpose, such as fieldwork, I just find it too difficult to get to bed in time.

The old man redpoll

A couple days ago we had a special visitor at the feeders. This one had come all the way from the coast of Hudson Bay, or perhaps even further. He was here with a flock of his cousins, who had probably travelled shorter distances than he had, although some of them may have been long-distance voyagers as well. He was a Hoary Redpoll.

Common Redpolls breed throughout the scrubby, stunted forest-tundra of the Hudson Bay Lowlands and surrounding regions. They are found through perhaps the upper quarter of Ontario. Even still, despite their name, they are not an incredibly common bird. The recent Ontario Breeding Bird Atlas indicates that the probability of encountering one in the first 20 hours of fieldwork in the Hudson Bay Lowlands is just 34%. Even less common is the Hoary Redpoll, and the probability of finding one of them is a mere 1%. All of the squares where the species was recorded were right up at the coast. The Ontario birds are the most southerly breeding population of the species in the world; most individuals occur further north than they are found here. To put in context the breeding location of these birds, they are found in the open tundra, placing their nests in willow thickets surrounding ponds, or in the stunted spruces scattered across the small ridges. They line their nests with ptarmigan feathers and Arctic Fox fur. That’s how far north they live.

Like Common Redpolls, Hoarys will migrate southward most winters, but appear in southern Ontario primarily in irruption years. I have seen, and identified, just 5 Hoary Redpolls in the years I’ve been birding. Three of these were in the fall of 2007, when we caught a huuuuge flock of redpolls at the research station, hidden among which were the Hoarys. The other two have been at our feeders this winter. The first one we didn’t get a very good look at, and it didn’t stick around. This is the first and only adult male that I’ve had good looks at.

You can tell it’s an adult male by the rose wash to its breast. Females will show no colour to the breast, though they’ll look nearly the same otherwise. Young males may be intermediate.

Part of the problem with identifying Hoarys is that they can look so similar to the Commons they hang out with. There are a few key identification features, the easiest of which to spot is probably the pure white undertail coverts. Look at the way the Hoary’s butt glows in the first photo. Of course, just like any good identification rule, it has its conditions. In this case, only the adult males have pure white undertail coverts. The females may show a streak or two, and young birds show more streaking than adults. However, all age/sex classes show proportionally less than the same age/sex class of Common Redpoll. Okay, so that doesn’t really help when you’ve got a young female Hoary beside an adult female Common (the males, of course, would have rose breasts). But hey – the young female Commons and adult male Hoarys should be no problem!

The photo above, of course, is a Common. Age/sex class undetermined.

Hoary Redpoll

Common Redpoll

Another fairly easy to spot characteristic is the head shape. Hoarys look like they have little heads for the size of their bodies. They’re not as deep, I guess, from bill to nape as a Common is, relative to the body. It gives them a pin-headed appearance. Added to this is their small, stubby bill, compared to that of a Common. At some angles these two features aren’t as apparent. A full profile shot with the bird looking downwards really emphasizes the shape, however.

Here’s another shot of the heads, Common on the left, Hoary on the right. The name Hoary, of course, comes from the pale colouration of their plumage compared to Commons. The word Hoary, interestingly, means “gray or white with, or as if with, age.” There are a few species named Hoary – the redpoll, of course, but also Hoary Marmot and Hoary Bat. Their fur is all white-tipped with a grizzled appearance. I suppose “Hoary Marmot” sounds better than “Grizzled Marmot”, although there’s the Grizzly Bear – same origin. Grizzly Marmot?

One last thing you could look at is the bird’s rump, although this can sometimes be hard to spot if the bird has its wings closed. However, if you can get a peek at it, it follows the same general pattern of plumage as the undertail coverts: Commons are streaky, while Hoarys are white. You can just get a hint of the Hoary’s rump in the photo on the right.

Here’re two males, the Hoary and a Common, side-by-side on the feeder. You get a sense of the lightness of the Hoary compared to the Common. You can also notice the difference in the streaks on the sides. In younger birds, this can often be useful in picking a Hoary out of a flock. Hoarys generally have thinner, more distinct streaks, while those of Commons are broader and diffuse.

Young female Common (left) and Hoary Redpolls

These last two photos, above and below, are of young female Hoary and Common Redpolls, side-by-side. These were the birds we caught in 2007. Having them up close, in the hand, was a huge advantage, but you can see the field marks you’d be looking for even if they were out sitting on a perch somewhere. I’ve been periodically checking out the birds at our feeders, looking for a possible female Hoary that had snuck in with the Commons, but hadn’t spotted one. Then this male showed up, which made the ID so much easier.

(My spellcheck is telling me that “snuck” isn’t a valid word. What?)

Young female Hoary (left) and Common Redpolls

There is some debate as to whether these two are, in fact, different species, or simply subspecies. Visually, even though it’s subtle, they do appear to be different species, but molecular studies suggest there’s not enough evidence for that. In Europe the Hoary is known as the Arctic Redpoll, and it’s the North American subspecies of Hoary that gets the name Hoary applied to it.

I was pleased to see this rare visitor at our feeders. Now we just need to attract some grosbeaks!