California Bird Jumble
By Corey • April 20, 2007 • 5 comments
Great-tailed Grackle
I couldn’t decide what species to highlight this weekend so I decided to pick a day to highlight instead.  All three non-quiz pictures were taken the same day, January 1 of this year, at the Wild Animal Park in Escondido, California. At the end of the post is a shorebird ID Quiz. I’ll let you all guess until Sunday night when I’ll reveal the correct answer (if I can figure it out).
Anna’s Hummingbird
Great Egret
Now for the ID Quiz. Name the species of each of the nine birds below. This one is hard. Winner gets a post on this blog on whatever question they can come with about birds but were afraid to ask (thank you google). But you have to include your question in your guess…
Can you get all nine?
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Well, I figure I have a 50-50 chance. Front to back: Willet, Long-billed Curlew, Marbled Godwit, Willet, and Short-billed Dowitcher. The alternate-plumaged dow have contrasting gray faces, and all have flat backs and rather short, distinctly down-kinked bills. You don’t happen to have a sound recording….
Great quiz!
Back to front, I mean.
OK, so I screwed up. There are actually 10 birds in the picture. The foot under the godwit’s belly is from a different bird than the beak sticking out from behind the curlew. And yes Rick, the foot belongs to a Willet but the beak belongs to something different…
Man, no one else is guessing…the last bird, whose beak is peaking out, is a Snowy Egret.
Wusses. Even though I punked out of Patrick’s birdsong quiz.
And when I saw these birds, in my notes of the day, I wrote “dowitcher species” because there were so many other birds around that I rarely see that dowitchers were not really my focus.
This quiz is sick. That you managed to get so many different species of shorebird in a photo is one thing, but that you’d inflict it on us right when many of us are getting our songbird eyes on is just cruel!