My son spotted this one in the back yard, and described it to me as having a
big finchy beak and lots of red and black, and I assumed it was a towhee --
but he was right: it was a black-headed grosbeak.

Huh, I said. Nice bird. It hung around a couple of days and then left
yesterday, and it didn't occur to me until now to wonder if that was an
unusual sighting for this time of year; is it? I've never had a grosbeak in
the fall, but the trees in my yard are getting pretty big and so our habitat
is changing....

So, to save time in the future, are there good seasonal range maps available
online that we could check?

-Josh Hayes, josh at blarg dott net

There is great chaos under heaven, and the situation is excellent. - Mao-Tse
Tung