Hey tweets, Mark is right. We've all pulled some pretty lofty floaters in
our time. In my master birder class, Dennis Paulson brought in some skins
(stuffed birds) one night and told us to go ahead and pick them up, as long
as we were careful. It was near the beginning of the course, and we had been
studying loons. I picked up one skin and announced that this must be a
winter plumaged Pacific loon because the demarcation between the black hind
neck and white fore neck was so distinct, whereas we all know that
red-throated loons' black hind necks shade more gradually into the white
fore neck. There was a bit of silence that greeted this high-level notation
of field marks, then Michael Hobbs said, "Hm, I always thought that loons
had webbed feet. This skin has lobed feet." Yep, we were looking at a
western grebe. - Connie

on 7/5/06 1:17 PM, Mark Egger at m.egger at comcast.net wrote:

> Don't feel bad -- I'm pretty confident every seasoned, hard-core
> birder on this list has a similar story to tell (whether they tell it
> or not!) -- I know I do! Although a Phainopepla in Seattle would have
> been a lot of fun -- an excellent & interesting species!
>
> Mark
>
>
> -
>> Hi folks,
>>
>> I know this is going to be disappointing to a lot of you, but I'm
>> afraid we can confirm that the bird we thought to be a Phainopepla
>> was actually a young Stellar's Jay (and extremely dark, even for a
>> Stellar's). We went back this morning to the same spot and found the
>> same bird, behaving exactly the same way. This Jay was a lot smaller
>> than most and almost completely black, but we were able to watch him
>> for longer. Our first clue was the absence of the conspicuous red
>> eye, this bird's was definitely black. After about twenty minutes,
>> he finally came down out of the tree, and when I saw the tiny bit
>> of blue on his tail feathers, I knew what we were dealing with.
>>
>> I want to apologize for getting everyone excited, but I'm pretty
>> certain you won't find a Phainopepla in the Arboretum this year.
>> Chalk it up to a couple of young birders who got a little over
>> excited when they couldn't figure out what they were looking at...
>>
>> Dan Corcoran
>