It’s Baby Bird Monday! Then we have the last 3 installments in Botswana from Kabecoo before Benw finishes out the week by taking us somewhere I have never heard of! (In case you want to refresh your memory of the rest of the trip, just click on Kabecoo to see all of the Botswana installments.) I am sad that this Botswana set is ending!
The second week of baby birds is here! And, if you want to see the images at their original size so that some of these subtle plumage details are visible, there is a link for that in every caption. As before, young birds are at left and adult birds at right in the images below.
We’ll start with shorebirds, where there are lots of plumage differences between hatch-year birds and adults, but most of those differences are pretty subtle. Shorebird gurus look at the patterns and colors on specific feather tracts, some of which are not easily seen without a good picture or a bird-in-the-hand. We can avoid all that in this species, the Solitary Sandpiper (Tringa solitaria), where the hatch-year birds have a distinguishing mark that can be easily seen in the field. The young bird on the left has plain gray/brown on the sides of the head, neck and upper breast. The adult bird (on the right) has obvious streaking in those same areas. Click here for larger image.
On The Road – Albatrossity – Summertime and Baby Birds part 2Post + Comments (18)