Subject: ID info request - hummer/oriole
Date: Jul 20 08:31:44 1998
From: "Joanne Powell" - jhpowell at snapwa.org


Hi tweeters:

I have a bird which I ID'd as either a female or imm. Bullocks. My question
is ... do these ever have a pale yellow hood which stops at the bottom of
the throat (as a spotted towhee's or a junco's would) instead of continuing
down the breast? The only bird that almost matches is the Bullocks female
but the bird I saw, close up and for a longish period, had a hood that
stopped at the base of the throat and a very pale gray breast. The
undertail was yellow. I could see the front of the wings, which were darker
that the breast but because of the angle I couldn't see if there were wing
bars. All things considered I'm pretty sure this is a Bullocks but all my
field guides show a slightly orangish-yellow head and breast. Do they cross
with anything other birds? Is the yellow hood color not continuing on down
the breast just an individual quirk? Is this fairly common and something
some of you have encountered before?

Second question: Hummer. There is a juvenile hummer I thought was a Rufous
spending a lot of time trying to defend one of the feeders. In this part of
WA we get Rufous, Calliope and Black-chinned. This young male has part of
his gorget coming in and quite a bit of rufous coloring on the sides. His
back is green but the rufous color on the back usually comes in just before
they leave (at least that was my experience last year). He is very
aggressive and is always fanning his tail when confronting the others at
the feeder. His tail is very wide and has large white spots on the tips. It
never occured to me he could be anything but a Rufous but when I was
looking in the field guides to show someone else what our locals looked
like, the male Rufous tails didn't show white nor did they look anywhere
near as wide as the one I keep seeing about 2 feet from my window. When I
rechecked the guides I saw that he looks like a Broad-tail. The guide maps
show BT to be in North Idaho, which is about 50-60 miles from here. The
female Rufous has the white spots, at least in the drawing in Audubon's
Master series. I have seen females with a small circular iridescent patch
on their throats. This particular hummer had a large triangular patch on
one side - about 1/3 of the throat is covered - which I figured is just the
gorget coming in as he matures. Do males have white spots and that
characteristic is just not shown in the two field guides I have at home; my
Peterson's is at work where I should be right now! Do Broad-tails
occasionally show up in NE WA? Since he appears to be a juvenile and I
haven't seen any others that resembled BTs earlier in the season, I'm not
sure it's possible for a BT to be this far west. Looking forward to any
enlightening comments anyone may have on these two.

Regards,

Joanne Powell
Reardan (Spokane) WA
jhpowell at snapwa.org