lies:
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!
Well, maybe I should reconsider the camera question. I can see how it would be helpful to get a better photo for studying later.
After I posted that, I looked on ebird.org and discovered that for a given hotspot you can look at charts of what time of year different birds have been spotted there. I had previously only seen lists of the most recent sightings of each bird. And your point is definitely supported by the charts: the yellow warbler isn’t around at this time of year. Plus, we are having a much colder winter than usual, so I’m sure the yellow warblers are gone. If there aren’t other likely birds, I’ll change that “warbler sp.” observation to orange-crowned warbler. In fact, someone reported one there just last week. I’d never seen one before so I didn’t feel confident about the ID.
I got a good enough look (through binocs) at the bird in the photo to be pretty sure that the back was a solid, not speckled, brown. There were two of them. Hmm. I’ll have to go back and see if I spot it again!
Thanks, @lies!
Hm. Your brown bird could have been house finch, maybe.
Yeah, those eBird histograms are fabulous. We had two Yellow Warblers for the Santa Barbara CBC this year, though we didn’t get any on the Carpinteria CBC. But other than those two birds I haven’t seen anyone report a Yellow Warbler from Santa Barbara county in months.
Reposted from https://lies.tumblr.com/post/672711530675109888.
