Subject: Re: What's the flashiest bird around here?
Date: Jul 31 10:27 PD 1995
From: Michael Price - michael_price at mindlink.bc.ca


Hi Tweeters,

On July 31, Susan Johnston asked:

>What *is* the flashiest bird in Western Washington/Oregon/BC? I think my
>nomination is the Western Tanager. Any others?

I thought this might be a rather easy question to answer--well, 'answer' is
the wrong word, as this thread involves personal taste--until I realised
that I didn't exactly know what 'flashiest' actually meant. Conspicuous?
Bright? Highly patterned? Discontinuously patterned? Complexly patterned?

And then, 'typical' of the region. Resident or migrant? Restricted to
Cascadia, the West, or found elsewhere in N. Amer.? Can it be a vagrant but
'typical' of our region, compared to the vagrants of other regions? Hoooo.
Gee, thanx, Susan; nothing like tossing your fellow Tweets a simple question
with a simple answer :-)

So, I got out my trusty NG and started trolling through it. Well, there are
no Cascadian-only birds, so let's limit the search to the West Coast. I'd
nominate (may I have the envelope, please): Black Oystercatcher.

With its crow-sized brown-black body, long *bright* red bill, red eye-ring,
lemon-yellow eye, thick pink legs, and mouthy calls, in Raymond Chandler's
great line, it's "as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a piece of angel food's
cake."

Close regional runners-up were Brandt's & Pelagic Cormorants, both of which
are--close up--*quietly* flashy. The midnight purple and green iridescences
and patternings on the mantle, scaps, and coverts, plus those astoundingly
beautiful eyes the color of turquoise, make the cormorants among the most
esthetically under-rated birds around. Yeah, and then they gotta go and open
their mouths...

And then there's Tufted Puffin, but we never get to see them in Vancouver
BC, so hard to say, but any bird that looks like a mime...

When enlarging the scope of the question to consider 'Western' birds, *many*
possibilities emerge: Lazuli Bunting, Black-headed Grosbeak, Williamson's
Sapsucker, Lewis'Woodpecker, Calliope Hummingbird. My personal fave is a
visual knockout whenever I see it: Violet-green Swallow.

Michael Price at mindlink.bc.ca