Rare Bird Sighting

How can you add adventure, excitement and discovery to your love of hiking in the mountains, camping or backpacking while helping conservation efforts? 

Pack a pair of binoculars to your gear and go birding.

Watching birds from your own backyard is an excellent way to get started but if you want to increase the level of excitement and learn more about your feathered neighbors, you need to start "birding" which is the active pursuit of birds found outside of your small familiar patch.

This week, we dedicated two days to surveying birds along a preselected route for an ongoing research project on Black Mountain. We were able to combine hiking and camping to this pursuit.

Violet-green swallow, Tachycineta thalassina

Female Western Tanager, Piranga ludoviciana

White-headed woodpecker, Picoides albolarvatus

It isn't often that you get a clear view of birds and when you can see them, hear them, and get a photo, it is pretty fantastic.

However, when you find a rare bird, the excitement quadruples. The Hepatic Tanager, Piranga flava, is a resident as far south as South America with its northernmost range in Arizona and New Mexico. It prefers breeding in open pine or pine-oak forest at moderately high elevations. Occasionally, it ventures off into other nearby states but it is not a common event. Black Mountain fits its requirements but is there a male with this female? We didn't discover the male but perhaps, they are breeding in our mountains without our knowledge.

Thanks to Adam's sharp ears hearing only call notes, we discovered a rare sighting of this bird. This is a perfect example of studying the details. At first glance, someone may call this a female western tanager but there are subtle physical differences as well as song differences.

Moments like this are not planned and rarely duplicated so it's best to enjoy the bird as long as it lets you before it takes flight.

After the moment ends, get on eBird and report your sighting. This will help further knowledge of researchers on your sightings.

Happy birding in your patch of the world!

Click on photos to enlarge
Photos and content by Robin Roberts
Recording by Adam Roberts

Reference

Eddleman, W. R. (2002). Hepatic Tanager (Piranga flava), version 2.0. In The Birds of North America (A. F. Poole and F. B. Gill, Editors). Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, NY, USA. https://doi.org/10.2173/bna.655