Subject: hybrid in CO
Date: Jan 25 17:00:37 2003
From: Michael Hobbs - hummer at isomedia.com


----- Original Message -----
From: "Scott R" <scray at wolfenet.com>
To: "tweeters" <tweeters at u.washington.edu>
Sent: Saturday, January 25, 2003 2:51 PM
Subject: RE: hybrid in CO

> It's very difficult to imagine a chickadee and a junco breeding
> together. Although both species breed in similar habitats,
> they are so extremely different in their habits.
> What are the other possibilities?

Scott and Tweeters:

Start with the form of the bird. This bird appears to be the same shape
and size as a Dark-eyed Junco. The beak and legs look like a junco's.
The behavior and posture look like a junco's. Everything about the bird,
except for the coloration of the plumage, appears to be a Dark-eyed Junco.

So, in fact, it is almost certainly a Dark-eyed Junco.

If you look at the diagram of feather groups on a Song Sparrow on page 84
of Sibley's "Birding Basics", you can see that only a very few feather
groups are "wrong" for Dark-eyed Junco. This bird appears to have an
anomaly such that the auriculars, lores, throat, and breast are
essentially white. It is hard to tell if the malars are dark, or if they
are only partially black, to provide the line of separation demarking the
throat from the white face. The upper breast feathers are black providing
the black band. There is a small white spot where the nape meets the
mantle.

This is probably not fundamentally different than a crow or robin with
white markings, something that is quite common
(see http://www.scn.org/earth/tweeters/images/piedcrw1.html and
http://www.scn.org/earth/tweeters/images/piedcrw2.html)

I've only seen a Dark-eyed Junco x Black-capped Chickadee hybrid once - it
was being eaten by my Basset Hound X Siamese Cat hybrid pet :)

== Michael Hobbs
== Kirkland, WA
== http//www.scn.org/fomp/birding.htm
== hummer at isomedia.com