Monday, October 9, 2017

Birding Quandary

Before I get to the quandary I promised you yesterday,
here are some more pics from the
Auto Tour:

Tule Lake National Wildlife Refuge
Western Grebe

Tule Lake National Wildlife Refuge
Pied-billed Grebe

Tule Lake National Wildlife Refuge
Red-tailed Hawk
Here's a cool pic of one of the canals on the auto tour...
That's a Great Blue Heron standing on the silver pipe!

Okay, yesterday I said I was going to post a quandary for you--and here it is...
Tule Lake National Wildlife Refuge
We saw our very first Great-tailed Grackle (you can read that post here) the other day on Road P. It was a female and she was a beaut! Fast forward to our trip to Klamath. We saw this bird on the auto tour and instantly thought it was also a Grackle. (Once you see a bird once, that species seems to pop up again and again!) When we put the photo into the Merlin ID app, it confirmed our guess.

But there's something missing from this Great-tailed Grackle...The GREAT-TAILED part!
great-tailed grackle
What happened to her tail??? These photos look like some kind of optical illusion or something and I can't explain what I'm seeing.
 Here's the one we saw on Road P so you can compare...
So, any theories? We're scratching our heads over this one and would appreciate any input you might have!

Up next on tomorrow's post: No quandaries, just egrets...




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