The Special bird (that wasn’t)
Time for another teachable moment in birding…
Over the Christmas holidays, while we were snowed in, I had a special visitor on the deck where Laurie were leaving peanuts for the locals. When the snow hit, the cold air brought in a few new visitors, including a group of Varied Thrushes (about 7) that adopted us, once they decided we weren’t trying to kill them — they are pretty careful birds, and we noticed them scouting the deck at a distance for a couple of days before venturing in. we’ve also had some Fox Sparrows join us for the winter, and our Spotted Towhee population has grown to three adult males and a female, and we only know it’s three because we’ve seen all three of them at one time a couple of times — not a species you can easily define individuals in.
One morning, while drinking my tea, I noticed a bird that seemed different from what we have been seeing, and as I studied it, my brain went “Savannah Sparrow”, which would be a new yard bird for me. I went and logged it into eBird, and it came up with a red dot.
eBird has a couple of notations it will add to the form to help birders recognize what is and isn’t expected at a given birding location. “Orange Dot” birds are birds that might be found in a location but are unusual, and “red dot” birds are birds that are not expected at that location at this time of year.
My Savannah Sparrow came up a red dot. That’s not a species expected to be seen in this region in the winter. If I really had seen it, that’d be a very notable discovery. Seeing this feedback from eBird, I reset my expectations and went back to watching, hoping to have a chance to study it further, because I didn’t feel my sighting met my standards for reporting a red dot bird.
It did return an hour or so later and I watched the bird for a bit, and I came away still feeling it was a Savannah Sparrow. It looked, to me, very much like one I’d seen in fall down at Foulweather Nature Preserve. (shown to the right). The Northwest Savannah Sparrow looks a bit different than the California ones, but I felt like I had the right ID for this bird, so I went ahead and submitted it to eBird.
A few days later I got the expected email from the county eBird reviewer. All reports like this are reviewed by a local expert, who also is one of the people who helps eBird set up which species get those orange and red dots; those dots, by the way, vary by season as expected species migrate in and out.
I had a great conversation with the reviewer, explained my reasoning and we talked over some aspects of the bird I’d seen. The reviewer ended up not being convinced, and since I didn’t have photos of the bird, I decided to modify the report and turn it into a mystery bird (“Bird SPP”) with my notes on it, because I didn’t feel my ID met the expectations I would want of a “red dot” report, so while I still felt it was a Savannah, it wasn’t reported as one in ebird.
(Digression: why this matters; one reason it matters is because it’s important that eBird data be as accurate as possible, obviously. But reporting out unusual birds (orange dots), or special rarities (the red dots) can cause other birders to decide to chase the rarity. If the sighting data is poor, it could cause others to waste time chasing a mirage, and I don’t want to do that. I especially don’t want to do that as my first special sighting in a new region where other birders don’t know my background — I want my reputation to be a careful birder that can be trusted, as I slowly earn my reputation here. The eBird reviewer can flag reports like these as confirmed or unconfirmed to help guide others in deciding whether to chase a report but I really felt I needed to have better data before making that kind of commitment on this bird)
And that’s where we left it. I had a mystery bird (if you’re a birder who never has mystery birds, congratulations, but maybe you’re pushing to ID everything too hard?) and I went back to just enjoying the birds again. Until about a week later, when I realized that the bird had shown up again, so I sat back to study it. It is a very subjective thing to define “that bird” with many species, and in this case, I think it was a combination of similar light and similar positioning that caught my eye, but now I’m trying to study it again to either get a better description to report, or to shift it to another species.
And this time, the bird turned to face me, and I saw a feature I either never saw in previous visits, or didn’t noticed, but it had a distinct white patch on the throat. I was sure the eyebrows and streaking on the chest made it the same bird, but that white patch made the ID obvious and easy: it’s a tan-striped variant of a white-throated sparrow; an uncommon bird but an expected bird for this area. And he does visit the feeders and desk every so often, but not regularly.
Which makes my mystery bird no longer a mystery, which makes me happy.
When I make a mistake like this, and then am able to correct it, I like to sit down and think about where my ID went off track. I can think of a few things. In my original sightings, I never saw the bird front on, only in profile. I can’ t see myself missing that field mark if I’d seen it. The eyebrows seemed yellowish to me in the light, which immediately nudged me towards Savannah and away from White-Throated. Since I know Savannah sparrows fairly well and White-Throated Sparrows in Silicon Valley were a special treat, I think I naturally shifted my thinking towards the familiar. “Yellowish” is a very subjective thing, and tan, or tawny colored is well along that spectrum. Having seen that white-throated in different light with it never having clicked in as “that bird”, it’s a reminder just how subjective this kind of evaluation is; that final viewing was in very similar light to the first ones, and that’s what triggered the connection to me.
Bird ID is very analog, very subtle, and we have to remember that each bird is different and never quite matches field guides. Lots of nuance and patience and thought for some species, which is, I think, what attracts those of us who become birders to this kind of thing; as I like to tell people, if it was easy we’d get bored and do something else. Sparrows are notorious as being difficult to ID in many cases, and so caution is always a good idea.
If you just look at these two photos, you might wonder how you could mistake them for each other, but realize, to a degree, both of those photos are idealized versions of the species; now, consider looking at the bird at some distance, constantly in motion, flitting in and out of shadows, partially obscured and generally not being cooperative. What may seem obvious in a field guide is rarely so in the field. And that’s the fun aspect of this: the chase, the study, the thinking, and then validating that thinking as well as you can.
In my case, I think I overweighted my familiarity with the species in my ID. My brain clicked, and I decided. The red dot in eBird forced me to question that, which was good, but even though I went back and studied options in the guides again after seeing that, I didn’t really see options I felt matched the bird — because as far as I can remember, it never showed me its throat until way later. I feel good about the process I took, and deciding to make it a mystery bird rather than force Savannah onto it, because, well, it wasn’t one. Most times, you don’t get another chance to clean up the ID on a bird like this, so it was nice that happened. A part of my wonders if I’m making a convenient connection between two birds to close out the mystery aspect of it, but I’ve considered that and still feel like it’s the same bird. Those are all the kinds of judgement calls you have to make, all the time, when watching birds out in the real world, and it’s both fun and satisfying.
As an amusing postscript to this, about a week after all this went down, the eBird reviewer submitted a sighting of — a Savannah Sparrow, his first ever winter sighting of the species in this area. Which I considered chasing, but only for a few minutes. Because, well, that’s just how life works some days…
(white-throated sparrow from All About Birds)
