On the Road is a weekday feature spotlighting reader photo submissions.
From the exotic to the familiar, whether you’re traveling or in your own backyard, we would love to see the world through your eyes.
Albatrossity starts us off with baby birds, and then we head to Kenya with way2blue for the rest of the week!
Albatrossity
Summertime is the season for seeing baby birds, whether as begging fledglings or as fully-flighted awkward adolescents. So I’m gonna devote the next couple of posts to these newbies, with pics of younger birds (technically called hatch-year birds) juxtaposed with adults of the same species. There are lots of ways to tell them apart, even for species that are not very colorful. But you need to pay attention to subtle colors and patterns on the feathers, as well as bill (and sometimes iris) colors and patterns. I understand that this level of detail might not be for everybody, but at least you get to see twice as many birds this week!
First up is one of the most familiar birds in North America, the Northern Cardinal (Cardinalis cardinalis). Young cardinals are abundant in my neighborhood in the late summer, and perhaps in yours as well. In this image (and all the others in this post) the hatch-year bird will be on the left, and the adult on the right. This young cardinal is a male, based on the hints of red plumage coming in on the juvenile brown body plumage. The other clue that this is a youngster is the bill. Baby cardinals have “dusky” bills that slowly turn red; you can still see dusky patches on this bird’s bill.
Next is a very familiar bird to us here in Flyover Country, the Grasshopper Sparrow (Ammodramus savannarum). Hatch-year sparrows of species whose adults have a clear un-streaked breast are often streaked, and vice versa. So this streak-breasted youngster will turn into the clear-breasted adult type in a few months. The other clue that this is a hatch-year bird is the yellow color of the gape (the hinge at the base of the open mouth on this bird). These so-called “baby lips” are common in lots of species, and will slowly lose that yellow color as the bird matures.
Eastern Kingbirds (Tyrannus tyrannus) are also very familiar to lots of birders in North America. This youngster not only has the standard baby lips, it has a short tail, which is also a trait commonly seen in many other species. That tail will grow out quickly, but birds fresh out of the nest will often have shorter tails than adults. Another more subtle feature seen in this comparison shot is the relative uniformity of the youngster’s plumage, and lack of feather wear. The latter is most easily seen when you compare those broad white fringes on the youngster’s wing feathers with the thin and worn white fringes of the adult.
Many very colorful birds are sexually dimorphic, and in most cases the adult males are much flashier than the adult females. In many of those species the hatch-year birds most closely resemble the adult females, and one of those species is the Baltimore Oriole (Icterus galbula). It can be pretty difficult to distinguish one of these hatch-year birds from an adult female bird, but fortunately this one still has the baby lips.
Non-passerine birds such as this Forster’s Tern (Sterna forsteri) often have distinctive juvenile plumages. Juveniles of this species have ginger-brown coloration on the back and wings, which quickly disappears as the feathers wear. You can still see some of that on the wings of this hatch-year bird, and a big patch of brown color on the lower neck.
Black-capped Chickadees (Poecile atricapillus) are also found across North America, and many of us have lots of these little sprites at our feeders year-round. This is a species where it can be pretty difficult to distinguish young birds from adults if they are not begging from a parent; plumages differences are subtle but they are there if you know what to look for. On a hatch-year bird, the black cap is browner, the lower border on the black bib is more raggedy, and the plumage is looser and fluffier, particularly the undertail coverts. All of those marks can be seen in this comparison shot. Many field guides do not mention these, so you are learning something here that you may not have ever read in a book!
The same loose fluffy juvenile plumage, as well as the aforementioned baby lips, can be seen in this young Blue-gray Gnatcatcher (Polioptila caerulea). You can also see that it has a somewhat brownish tone compared to the eponymous blue-gray of the adult.
This one is a little trickier. Hatch-year Eastern Phoebes (Sayornis phoebe) have a smudgy bib that extends across the chest, and often a light lemony tinge on the belly, which you can perhaps convince yourself you see on this one. Thankfully it has those baby lips.
By now you should be good at this. Baby lips and short tails. Scissor-tailed Flycatcher (Tyrannus forficatus).
The final bird for today is kinda tricksy; I was fooled in the field and only realized what I was looking at when I get the images onto a large computer monitor. Like the oriole above, Summer Tanagers (Piranga rubra) are sexually dimorphic; males are bright red and the females a duller yellow-green. And, as mentioned above, the hatch-year birds resemble adult females.
So why is that nearly tailless bird on the right not identified as a hatch-year bird? First, it is molting season for adult tanagers here, and loss of tail feathers can certainly happen in a molt. Second, it doesn’t have baby lips like the bird in the left of the image. Finally, one plumage character that is very helpful can be seen in both of these birds.
The primary coverts (the wing feathers visible underneath the fluffy white flank feathers in the bird on the right) are dark with extensive yellow edging in the adult, and brown with brownish edging in the hatch-year bird. The adult also seems to be overall brighter yellow in that fresh plumage, but this might be a trick of the lighting.
eclare
What an interesting post!
Wanderer
Very fun learning about the babies. As always, the photos are beautiful.
JeanneT
I didn’t know I needed to know about baby lips on birds!
sab
Well I feel better now. We had a cardinal nest beside our sunroom. They hid it well so we could not see much, except one time a baby beak being fed. A few days later the nest was empty and a very scruffy-looking small female was out front by the bird feeders. We thought something awful had happened to the baby.
In retrospect the scruffy-looking “female” was probably the baby. I keep forgetting how fast baby birds grow.
Dorothy A. Winsor
Very cool post
evodevo
Yeah…the baby lips give the parents a target to hit when they are poking bugs down gullets in the nest lol. On another note, we have had hardly ANY bugs here in KY this summer, compared to what I remember from just a few years ago. I’m wondering how that has affected the survival rate of nestlings this year….July and August used to be chock full of grasshoppers, butterflies and their caterpillars, etc. and I have spotted only a few. if there are no bugs, there will be no birds…
Baud
Nice bookend to the Medium Cool post from last night.
Albatrossity
@sab: Yeah, birds are done growing when they leave the nest.
In fact, a baby bird might be at its highest-ever body weight on the day it leaves the nest. All that free food and no exercise! They trim down pretty fast once they fledge and have to fend for themselves.
Very different from human babies, or any other babies, for that matter. That’s just another reason why birds are so special!
marklar
Thanks! Juvenile plumage can be really challenging (e.g., juvenile little blue heron if you just look at the feathers), and your shots are field-guide worthy in helping to point out the differences.
Albatrossity
I do wish that the images were bigger so that folks could see the plumages etc better, BJ used to have a feature where you could embiggen the image to its full size, but that went away quite a while ago. So here’s a trick that will allow you to do that, at least for a Windows PC (you Mac folks are on your own with this, but I suspect that there is a way to do it). We’ll use the grasshopper sparrow image above as an example.
1) Right-click on the image and select “copy image address”.
2) Open a new tab in your browser and paste the address there. For the sparrow image that address should be https://balloon-juice.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/grsp-768×430.jpg
3. Edit that address to remove the hyphen and the numbers. In this case https://balloon-juice.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/grsp-768×430.jpg becomes https://balloon-juice.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/grsp.jpg
4) Hit the enter key and you should see the full size image.
Kristine
Thanks for these photos. And I learned something today–baby lips!
I’ve had a red-headed woodpecker pair in my yard this summer. Then one day a few weeks ago I spotted a striking b/w bird with white feathers on the back and wings. It reminded me of woodpeckers, but it had a solid black head. Looked it up and sure enough, it was a juvenile red-headed woodpecker. Some time later, I spotted one parent pecking into the trunk of one of my bur oaks, baby right by its side–I couldn’t tell if parent was feeding junior or showing them how to peck. Meanwhile, Parent #2 was perching high up in a neighboring tree, I assume keeping watch.
We have cowbirds in the area. I’ll never forget watching a small bird–iirc a sparrow–feeding a much larger bird that hopped after it with open beak. I realized later it must’ve been a cowbird baby.
apieceofpeace
Your posts are filled with information, and am now considering a good pair of binoculars, several books on birds and birding and welcoming this new interest. Very appreciative of your knowledge.
SteveinPHX
Thank you for photos and the education. I will be back to study this post!
WaterGirl
@Baud: Um, yeah, thank you, we did that on purpose, thanks for noticing. //
WaterGirl
@Albatrossity:
That feature has not gone away. But it does not work for photos that are uploaded using the On the Road form.
JanieM
Thank you, Albatrossity, this is wonderful! Enjoyment, education, great pics…..what could be better for a Monday morning.
mvr
This is great. I often have trouble telling young cardinals from female cardinals.
Thanks!
stinger
Great pics, as always, and such useful text! Thank you!
StringOnAStick
Your comments in many posts about how young birds can look so different than the parents opened my eyes to a new bird world.
Yesterday a parade of California quail hustled by on top of the privacy fence between our yard and the next one. I counted 16, 14 of which were obviously juveniles due to being a bit shorter and definitely not as plump as the two adult ‘watch birds”, one at the front, another at the back. I’m glad they use the fence top, otherwise we wouldn’t see them nearly as often because I made it a point to do the new landscape with lots of cover for them and plants for hummingbirds and pollinators. The dusty path on the other side of the house was covered in quail foot prints and dust bath concavities, so I know our suburban yard is a favorite (no dogs or outdoor cats in our yard).