Hi Tweets,

Thanks for all of your responses! Here's some of the possibilities:

Jerry Tangren writes:
>>From the hip, wild guess: Lewis Woodpecker--but call note not quite right

Jerry, the flight was only somewhat woodpecker-like in that it was shallowly
undulant, and Lewis's is a fair bit bigger than this bird.


Steve Bouricius writes:
>Sounds like an American Dipper to me, how far were you from a river?

About 5-6 km north of the Fraser River's North Arm, Steve, but two blocks
from a boulder/mudflat beach; American Dipper's a possibility I wouldn't
have thought of considering the dearth of running water in this part of the
city. Besides, the jizz wasn't chunky enough: this bird was relatively
small-bodied, big-winged, short-tailed.


Mike Patterson writes:
>My first choice... recently fledge _Sturnus vulgaris_. It's that time of
>year when these pest start popping up... Phone calls from concerned citizens
>about the baby "robins" that have fallen from their nests...
>
>Too prosaic? Well, then Red-breasted Sapsucker. The call fits, ungulate
>flight, not a passerine, though.

Whatever it was, Mike, that flight-call snapped my head around. I did think
of this possibility, since there's tons of 'em about to appear (oh, joy--),
but I'm completely certain it wasn't a starling of any age or voice: the
jizz wasn't right.

As far as the sapsucker, another species considered and dropped at the time,
see my response to Michael Hobbes. Interesting suggestion, though!

Scott Richardson writes
> Dickcissel?

I know nothing about this species, so can't judge-- does the call note and
jizz conform to the description? A yummy speculation, though.

Michael Hobbes wrote:
>Have you ruled out cowbird? I *hate* to suggest something so common, but it
>was what came to mind from your description. They make an astonishing number
>of sounds.

Ain't *that* the truth. And I do appreciate your suggestion!

Over the years, I've learned the hard way that anything unusual is 99.8% of
the time gonna be something usual in odd context. However, I've become
pretty familiar with the local avifauna; while a common species occasionally
tosses something new at me from time to time such as an odd call or posture
or plumage state--by now I have a feel for the common stuff, and I won't
usually go on Red Alert when I first hear a variant call: more like, 'that
sounds kind of odd--let's check it out'. And normally I can tell or guess
roughly who the more usual suspects are of a weird variant call or posture.

In this instance, I knew *instantly* this call was typical of the bird and
*different* to anything in the local avifauna: I didn't have to think about
it. Rusty Blackbird? Eastern Meadowlark? Escaped exotic? Just three of the
possibilities I considered.

Also, the jizz was wrong for cowbird and much wrong for Brewer's, though
something in the blackbird family seems possible: that's why--if it were a
blackbird--I considered only Rusty (which is a great rarity here in
Vancouver BC): it had that short-tailed look. But the wings seemed
comparatively very broad and rounded for a blackbird. There's a remote
chance it was a woodpecker, though I've never heard a woodpecker call at the
bottom of each undulation in its flight, and I've never heard that call from
any woodpecker species. Just to show that anything's possible, though, I
recently saw a thrush-like bird with red on it blasting through an alder
stand in the woods in sustained thrush-like flight. Natural assumption would
be an American Robin, and that's what I immediately called it: color was
right, flight was right, size was right, habitat, etc. But then the bird
plastered itself against a tree-trunk and resumed being a Red-breasted
Sapsucker. Oh boy. Learn something new every day.

Thanks for all your thoughts. This one continues to remain a mystery.

M