Birding

Fooled Again

January 16, 2018 by Corey 8 Comments

Stick birds. Rock birds. Plastic bag birds. Leaf birds. Stump birds. Branch birds. Snow birds. Lump birds. Pipe birds. Plastic birds.

Every birder has been fooled at least once by inanimate objects masquerading as birds. This has a lot to do with the way the birding mind recognizes patterns: see the correct shape and color in the right context and you automatically think that distant plastic bag shifting in the breeze is a distant Snowy Owl. I once thought a rusted pipe was a Green-winged Teal.

So as I drove around Meadow Lake in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park the object in the images above and below caught my eye. Through the heat haze where my car’s warmth escaped the passenger side window and the reeds that lined the shore I could swear that the shape, size, and texture of the object correlated with bird. Not only that, I was convinced, for some reason, that I had found a rail.

It’s vaguely rail-like, no?

Closer examination, through my spotting scope, without the heat haze issue, revealed the true identity of the not-bird. It was a coconut. Yes, a coconut, abandoned on the ice of Meadow Lake. I don’t understand either.

Oh well. At least I took some pretty pictures of pigeons.

…

bird identification Flushing Meadows Corona Park

Written by Corey

Corey is a New Yorker who lived most of his life in upstate New York but has lived in Queens since 2008. He's only been birding since 2005 but has garnered a respectable life list by birding whenever he wasn't working as a union representative or spending time with his family. He lives in Forest Hills with Daisy and Desmond Shearwater. His bird photographs have appeared on the Today Show, in Birding, Living Bird Magazine, Bird Watcher's Digest, and many other fine publications. He is also the author of the American Birding Association Field Guide to the Birds of New York.

8 Comments

threecollie January 16, 2018 at 9:22 am
CBC many moons ago…..A whole car full of us stared into a neighbor’s swamp, delighted, in a month of not much open water, to find a lovely Mallard drake posing happily for our cameras. However, it didn’t seem to move much. Maybe it was cold. Or maybe it was a plastic decoy that was still there when spring melted the ice it sat in.
Thomas P Brown January 16, 2018 at 9:35 am
I once spent 45 minutes slowly sneaking up on an interesting chunk of moss that I was quite convinced was an owl, in the Olympic National Forest.
Great image of the pigeons though!!
Pat O'Donnell January 16, 2018 at 11:11 am
Nice record of a coconut that looks like a sculpture of an angelfish.
Iolanthe January 16, 2018 at 11:17 am
Ha, just this week-end I spent way too long staring at a strange black bird with shiny feathers standing very still next to the water until I finally realized it was a small hunk of wet wood.
John January 16, 2018 at 11:33 am
Sounds can also be deceptive sometimes.
Tom Gaskill January 17, 2018 at 1:27 pm
Evidently, it was dropped there by a swallow. (Monty Python fans know the reference.)
Here in Arizona, one of our most common birds is the ocotillo-seed-head bird. They’re very common. No coconuts, though. Apparently, we don’t have the right kind of swallows.
Michael Ayers January 17, 2018 at 7:30 pm
But, was the coconut brought to NY by an African- or European-swallow?
Jochen January 20, 2018 at 3:10 pm
At the Mediterranean Sea some fishermen mark their nets with small sticks to which they attach little black flags, which move in the waves and wind. Good fun when trying to spot tube-noses while sea watching…