Today (or rather, yesterday; how did it get so late??) I visited Salesforce Park, a park on the roof of a 4-story (maybe the fourth level is the park?) transit center in downtown San Francisco, which extends for several blocks. It’s a great park in the midst of a concrete jungle, apparently providing habitat for a large variety of birds, as well as some green space for people to enjoy. There are some fairly impressive trees. It must’ve been very expensive to build and plant. I didn’t even know about it until today! I’ll have to go back.
I saw several good birds: some white-crowned sparrows, a couple of house finches, a Townsend’s warbler, a yellow-rumped warbler, another warbler I couldn’t identify (well, I think it was a warbler. It was basically all yellow and had a thin beak; at first glance and based on its behavior, I thought it might be a ruby-crowned kinglet, but when I looked in the binoculars it was too yellow and didn’t have enough of a white eye-ring. The underside of the tail feathers were possibly black. At the time, looking at Merlin, I thought it was an orange-crowned warbler, but now I suspect it might be a yellow warbler?). Plus a couple of this sparrow(?) in the terrible cell phone photo above, to the right of the big plant cone thing. It was not a California towhee. The back seemed to be solid dark brown (not speckled), but the front was white and streaky, reminding me of a song sparrow–but song sparrows don’t have such a solid-colored back, do they? @lies, do you have any ideas about this little brown bird or about the possible warbler? I submitted my checklist too soon and will have to edit it…
On your warbler, Orange-crowned makes more sense for the date; you should have a fair number of them around at this time of year, and that’s the bird that came to mind as I was reading your description. A Yellow Warbler *could* be there in the winter, but it would be more of a surprise. Nearly all the Yellow Warblers you would have had there in the breeding season should have migrated south for the winter. They can be a tricky species pair, because you often don’t have obvious distinguishing “field marks” to guide you; both can be pretty “generic” looking. There are differences, and you can learn to look for and recognize those differences, but it takes some effort.
Song Sparrow kind of works for your photo, I think. Yes, the back looks more uniform than a clearly-seen Song Sparrow back would look, but that might be an effect of the limited resolution of the photo.
Thanks for including a photo! For remotely helping out with bird ID a photo is hugely helpful. If you can get even a little more detail it will help even more. I know you’ve mentioned before your reasons for choosing not to do more photography, which I respect. I’ll just say in passing that if you WERE to pick up a small camera in the “compact superzoom” category and carry it with you on your birdwatching excursions you’d be able to get identifiable shots of pretty much any bird close enough for you to see it well through binoculars.
Having a photo really changes things. Especially for birds I’m not confident I can identify, having that objective evidence I can go back to later with references open, or that I can share with more experienced people, makes a tremendous difference.
I dunno. Everyone birdwatches for their own reasons, and I realize that my reasons aren’t going to be universal. If you are enjoying yourself then you’re doing it right.
Thanks again for sharing!
Reposted from https://lies.tumblr.com/post/672669232072392704.
Tags: birds, really it's hard to understand why anyone wouldn't watch birds.
