That message was almost poetry ... thanks!

I was quite proud of myself the other day when walking along the Sammamish Trail - I saw an unusual-looking sparrow and rather than jumping to any number of possible (but erroneous) conclusions, managed to ID it after a few moments as a juvenile white-crowned sparrow. I remember mistakenly ID'ing this bird as a chipping sparrow in winter on the Samish flats (in my defense, so did the rest of the Audubon field trip!) and was roundly reprimanded by Tweeters! (in a positive way). I was almost as excited to get the ID right as I would have been to find some truly unusual sparrow. Last summer, I managed to ID a juvenile towhee without having any idea what they looked like and without recourse to a guidebook until after making my guess.
I remember in the early days of my birding being thoroughly confused by song, fox, and lincoln sparrows and thinking I would never be able to tell them apart. Now it's easy (at least in this part of the country, I'm sure I'll get confused again by some regional variants in other places).

Having mastered juvenile sparrows, can gulls be far behind??? Of course, I first have to start with ADULT gulls... :-)) - Teresa Michelsen