Pages

Monday, December 26, 2016

Needed a fix

It felt like I hadn't taken any bird, butterfly, or dragonfly photos in ages, so feeling a bit of desperation when I spied a small flock of meadowlarks foraging in the yard in Alpine.  I figured I'd challenge myself to take better shots of them than I already had, and also to see if I could get photos good enough for positive identification. Like shots of the tails spread. I couldn't get the latter except when they flew, and then only blurry in-flight shots.


Meadowlarks never let me get close enough for good shots, but Kelly was able to definitively ID them as Lillian's subspecies of Eastern Meadowlark. I didn't even notice until he pointed it out to me that this one has an abnormally long bill. In the back of my mind, when I first downloaded the photos, I thought to myself that I had never before realized how long the bills are on meadowlarks. Duh! I might be hopeless. I wonder if my prosopagnosia (face blindness) has anything to do with it.


_____________________________

UPDATE: This species name has since been changed to Chihuahuan Meadowlark.

2 comments:

  1. Please contact Fred Collins regarding the abnormal bill. We have recorded a similar abnormality. The bird was up at Red Bluff reservoir. Happy New Year.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks. Will do. I was hoping someone was interested in this, but didn't know who.

    ReplyDelete