It’s no surprise to see a song sparrow in my neck of the woods. They appear regularly at our feeders at home and in the parks and woods across this part of the country. This morning, I caught the one topping this post near the parking lot at the Mercer Meadows Pole Farm.
While most of my reports contain “the usual suspects,” I’m always delighted when I get an unexpected bird, even more so when e-Bird software provides the ID. Today at the Pole Farm, while hoping to find warblers at the old AT&T Building One site, I spotted what turned out to be a grasshopper sparrow.
I thought I was shooting a field sparrow when I squeezed off the shot and again when I brought the image up on screen at home. Once I copied the image into Apple Photos, the grasshopper ID came up. Could that be right, I thought?
Still thinking field sparrow, I uploaded the image into e-Bird as such. The e-Bird software immediately flagged it as a grasshopper sparrow. With its huge database of birds and their photos, e-Bird’s image recognition ability has improved greatly over the last few years. For that, I am extremely grateful.
Two days ago at the Pole Farm, I looked high up into a tree and spotted a woodpecker-like bird. I shot a few photos, then looked at the image on my camera screen. Oh my — that looks like a yellow-bellied sapsucker.
I was reasonably confident I’d made the proper ID, and once I loaded the image into e-Bird I got confirmation. I can count on one hand without the number of yellow-bellied sapsuckers I’ve logged on e-Bird, so getting that confirmation was a thrill.
On Wednesday, I used a double dose of bird recognition software to make an identification on another bird I rarely see.
I was looking for warblers at the Building One oval and had my Merlin app running on my iPhone. I heard a sharp two note cry and watched Merlin light up with “sharp-shinned hawk.”
I immediately looked up and spotted a hawk flying above me land near the top of a tall tree. The bird’s back was to me, and eventually the bird turned its head to the right just enough for me to get two shots showing its beak and right eye.
I find distinguishing sharp-shinned hawks from Cooper’s hawks nearly impossible in the field, so I waited until I got home and loaded one of the photos into e-Bird before concluding I’d indeed gotten a sharpie.
As much as I try to make ID’s in the field using only my eyes and memory of field marks, I’m glad to have the technological tools to help track what I observe in the field. That’s why I thank and support the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.