GAME: name that bird!

[Soukous]

29 minutes ago, kittykat23uk said:

How should I know? I was just going on the habitat I am not familiar with many hummingbirds and to be honest am just taking a wild stab in the dark

 

Ah, I see my preferred method has other devotees. 

[inyathi]

@GalanaI'm not sure how much travel you done in South America outside of Ecuador and of course you won't wish to reveal that, but the habitat as I said suggests somewhere quite dry and nowhere in Ecuador comes to mind, my gut so to speak, said it was a hummer, but I thought it prudent to rule out sunbirds, but I didn't really think it looked like one, the wing shape is classic hummer, so I was still sure it was a hummer, when you confirmed it. My gut is now saying that this is a North American species and my belief that the habitat looks quite dry, points to the Southwest and Mexico, if it is a US/Mexican species that cuts the options down very considerably, Ecuador has 123 different hummers, my North America book has just 21 in it, some of those have already been crossed off, one that's not been mentioned is Anna's.    

 

I'm not at all sure, but I will suggest Anna's hummingbird. 

Edited September 22, 2020 by inyathi

[Galana]

8 hours ago, kittykat23uk said:

But I shall try Allen's hummer next.. 

Definitely not. Are you seeing a small dark throat spot like I think @inyathi is?

I am not certain it is nothing more than a ruffled feather ( we get a few of those on this thread) but it could be anything.

@inyathiWell that would shorten the magic 300 even more than @kittykat23ukdid.

It is good to see deductive powers at work instead blind adherence to pictures.

6 hours ago, inyathi said:

of course you won't wish to reveal that,

You got that bit right but sadly not Annas.

I will look to see if I have a different angle photo. As you can imagine I fired off a few once I got to locate it better. Some photos show an empty nest so it must have nipped off for a comfort break without me seeing it. Don't you love narrow fields of view.

Edited September 22, 2020 by Galana
Spelling

[inyathi]

@GalanaI wasn't convinced that the bill was quite right for Anna's, so I'm not too surprised that was wrong, I will take another guess and suggest Calliope Hummingbird, if that's wrong, well at least I will have crossed another one off. 

[Soukous]

3 hours ago, Galana said:

Well that would shorten the magic 300 even more

 

Once you've narrowed it down a bit I cam start guessing 

[Galana]

44 minutes ago, Soukous said:

Once you've narrowed it down a bit I cam start guessing 

Folks who leave the bidding until late often get beaten by the Auctioneer's hammer and end up with nothing..

 

@inyathiNot a Calliope. Sorry.

[offshorebirder]

19 hours ago, Galana said:

In my opinion, and I am on foreign ground with Hummers, I feel there are sufficient indicators to ID the bird.

 

That is not true.   The photo is poor and also does not show enough characteristics to reliably ID the bird.

 

No more beating around the bush:  I am sorry @janzin recruited @Galana to this game because he has been driving it downhill steadily.

Edited September 22, 2020 by offshorebirder

[offshorebirder]

10 hours ago, Galana said:

12 hours ago, kittykat23uk said:

How about Costa's hummingbird?

Does it not look a bit too big for that? Remember

 

How exactly are we supposed to judge size from the photo provided?

[offshorebirder]

What little is shown can nearly all be dismissed as potential photo artifacts.    

[Galana]

I am sorry @janzin recruited @Galana to this game because he has been driving it downhill steadily.

 

Sorry you feel that way Nate,

When I joined, the game it had stalled for 14 days on what I recall was a Pipit or Lark.

 

Which of my previous five species did you not approve of?

 

At the start I read this post :-

 

“That's slightly the trouble with this game,  you have to post difficult birds, otherwise, one of us regulars will give the answer straight away, (as I demonstrated with those francolins) but then that makes it too hard, for those who aren't such experience birders or who haven't travelled enough to have lots of different books, this makes it hard to attract more players. I don't know what the answer is."

 

And I had this to say;

 

“I am the new kid on the block and I am happy to oblige but I honestly would not have thought we had to post a full frontal showing all Fieldmarks in one go or surely we risk falling foul of my new favourite phrase "The Longitude Lottery!" and it simply devolves into whoever sees it first wins. “

 

And later added

 

“As to the nature of the game, as a newbie I view it as a test of recognition skills not a game of snap! If there is no skill then where is the fun? No I don't mean various parts of birds sticking out of a bush, just a bit of a test rather than a parade of excellent portraits to showcase our birds.”

 

Nobody  dissented.

 

How many LBRs in perfect afternoon sunlight do we want?

 

“Trying to find crappy shots that never made it ” seemed to follow those thoughts.

 

Heck, even with ALL the fieldmarks in view one post the ID was wrong.

 

It’s been mostly fun but time to move on I feel.

Edited September 22, 2020 by Galana

[Galana]

1 hour ago, offshorebirder said:

How exactly are we supposed to judge size from the photo provided?

Bill and eye size to body ratio? General jizz?

[Galana]

2 hours ago, offshorebirder said:

The photo is poor and also does not show enough characteristics to reliably ID the bird.

Yup. That is what happens when you handhold  a $100 Camera in 35 degree heat. Sometimes it is not what you CAN see but what you can't that helps the ID!

[offshorebirder]

8 minutes ago, Galana said:

2 hours ago, offshorebirder said:

How exactly are we supposed to judge size from the photo provided?

Bill and eye size to body ratio? General jizz?

 

Neither tells us anything about the bird's size.

 

[offshorebirder]

6 minutes ago, Galana said:

Sometimes it is not what you CAN see but what you can't that helps the ID!

 

Not with a photo that poor.

[janzin]

Now now, let's not take this too seriously. It's just a game after all!

 

But one thing I do wonder is that maybe because some of the selections have been so difficult, we are alienating others that might want to join in. Perhaps making them a bit easier wouldn't be a bad thing? So what if they get answered quickly, that just means another will get posted and the game will move on.

 

[kittykat23uk]

The trouble is with confusion species like female hummers and sunbirds, and many warblers and flycatchers is that you need a reasonably clear photo to be able to see the identifying features. I think if it's a more distinct bird, then a lower quality photo is probably acceptable and helps to prolong the game a bit. In this case, there is a lot of noise and purple fringing and all the fine details of the bird have been smeared away. I think if we knew the location of the bird and could nail it on nest shape and habitat, we might stand a chance, but as it stands, there is not enough to go on to do anything other than take a wild stab in the dark.  

[offshorebirder]

I agree with @janzin and @kittykat23uk.

 

Perhaps someone should copy and paste a list of the hummingbirds of the world to answer the current submission (much faster than guessing one by one), then the game can move  on.

 

 

[Galana]

4 hours ago, offshorebirder said:

Perhaps someone should copy and paste a list of the hummingbirds of the world to answer the current submission (much faster than guessing one by one), then the game can move  on.

I can do better than that. Even the nest and thorns look the same.

Xantu's Hummingbird. That's the problem with birds. Quite often they don't have enough characteristics to fit the photos in the Field Guide. 

Select your own winner.

 

[offshorebirder]

Part of the benefit of this game is that done properly, it can help people learn birds they do not currently know how to ID.   I would note that "easy" clear photos are good for helping this learning process.

 

The bird in the latest photo clearly has a buffy chin, throat, breast, and flanks.   It also clearly has a broad white supercilium and no gorget spotting.  Among other features that are discernable.

 

The bird in the first photo appears to have no well-defined supercilium, a white throat-meets breast area, perhaps a white upper breast-meets-flanks area, and spots of color on the gorget (perhaps a photo artifact as I mentioned earlier).  These look diametrically opposed to the true field marks!

 

So the first photo seems to be a misleading mashup of photo artifacts obscuring the actual field marks.   It baffles me to think that might be considered fun to guess at.

 

In terms of who goes next, I suggest @pedro maia (since he went before this episode) but would be glad to see anyone jump in with a submission.

 

[pedro maia]

I wont be able to post a photo now so it will have to be someone else.

[BRACQUENE]

Don't worry it will not be me  but this morning after recieving so many posts  the last days ,  I had a first look at this one and I might perhaps have found the solution by deduction  if I looked a bit earlier as I know  @Galanavisited the arid canyons and hills around Danzante Bay along the Sea of Cortez in Baja California with a lot of cacti and shrubs  and in that area there are two endemic species : The Xantus’ and the Costa’s hummingbirds.

But as I said before : cobbler stick to your last

[Galana]

I have not been receiving notifications so missed the last few post and nath's continued carping.

 

On 9/22/2020 at 8:39 PM, offshorebirder said:

No more beating around the bush:  I am sorry @janzin recruited @Galana to this game because he has been driving it downhill steadily.

I had refrained from comment on his offensive accusation that I had somehow driven the game downhill as I am not one given to argue in public.      I don't Bleat around the Bush as it were.

 

But I WILL defend myself and my photographs as I note  there was no response to my earnest question as to which of the five submissions to date had caused this alleged downhill slide.

I have freely admitted that the Hummer was not pin perfect as a combination of the need to crop heavily from the original 1.45MB image and chromatic aberration BUT I strongly dispute the image was lacking in field marks. After all it was ALL I had to go on myself as I was alone and not with an 'expert local guide' to tell me what the bird was. And if I could do it, not being a Hummer expert having only seen them on two trips to where they occur, I don't know why others more expert could not.  My only advantage was, having been there, I knew the location and was therefore literally on firm ground..

but as @inyathihad narrowed matters down to the arid lands of SW USA and Mexico there are only a couple of dozen species it could be. Evidently that was still not good enough for Nath.

Even my posting of another Xantu was not good enough it seems.

13 hours ago, offshorebirder said:

The bird in the first photo appears to have no well-defined supercilium, a white throat-meets breast area, perhaps a white upper breast-meets-flanks area, and spots of color on the gorget (perhaps a photo artifact as I mentioned earlier).  These look diametrically opposed to the true field marks!

 

13 hours ago, offshorebirder said:

These look diametrically opposed to the true field marks!

There is  a good reason for that. Birds display different plumages at different times of year and development. They don't pop out of the egg as fully formed replicas of the (sometimes misleading )portraits in expensive Field Guides. All birders surely know that.

My bird HAS incipient signs of the white supercilium and contrasting cheek patch and not all Xantu's show the white superilium and buffy breast colour as two other photos in my possession taken in the same area clearly show but for some reason they won't upload..

 

 

So lets get on with the game, it is a game, and leave the bleating to Cameroptera and Carping to fishermen.

 

 

Edited September 25, 2020 by Galana
Spelling

[offshorebirder]

3 hours ago, Galana said:

My bird HAS incipient signs of the white supercilium and contrasting cheek patch

 

Only if one yearns to see that.   One could just as easily say that it does not and the bird had a mottled face due to molt.

 

  

3 hours ago, Galana said:

Birds display different plumages at different times of year and development. They don't pop out of the egg as fully formed replicas of the (sometimes misleading )portraits in expensive Field Guides. All birders surely know that.

... and not all Xantu's show the white superilium and buffy breast colour as two other photos in my possession taken in the same area clearly show but for some reason they won't upload..

 

None of that changes the fact that your low-quality photo had misleading photo artifacts and lacked detail/identifiable features.  Put yourself in our shoes, not knowing the location.  For example: I don't think the (lack of) details in your photo completely eliminate a female Black-chinned Hummingbird, some such individuals have very decurved  bills approaching  yours and the angle could potentially cover that.   I had inklings of other similar non-elimination but have no desire to waste time researching such a dead end.

  

3 hours ago, Galana said:

there was no response to my earnest question as to which of the five submissions to date had caused this alleged downhill slide.

 

I was going to let that pass so as not to affect the tone too much, but since you insisted...  How about the one where  I dropped the following heavy hints  (that were certainly further ignored with the last very poor quality image):

 

* In terms of rules, an unwritten one of the Name That Bird game is to try and post at least decent quality photos.  We can all post blurry or tiny shots, or a quarter inch of a bird in the grass - but where's the fun in that? 

<blunt mode on> cannot see enough details in this one to get motivated.<end blunt mode>

 

And the downhill slide is also a result of posts that did NOT contain bird images.   As was noted in private messaging to me, your presence has helped infect "Name That Bird" with the navel-gazing blather of "Where was this photo taken" and has put people off.    

This is a good example of that, to name just one:

https://www.safaritalk.net/topic/2047-game-name-that-bird/?do=findComment&comment=314706

 

Edited September 25, 2020 by offshorebirder

[inyathi]

I’d be happy to post something, but I think Jo @kittykat23ukunless I'm mistaken, you named at least one more hummer, from the right region than I did, so I think you should pot one if you have one.

 

To offer my two penneth or cents to those of you across the Pond. I think this is all something of a major misunderstanding, I wouldn’t like to see any of us seriously fall out over this, when this is after all just a game.

 

The important thing to remember is that people’s minds work in different ways, I think @Galana's choice of photo wasn’t actually unreasonable, but then my focus is never just on the bird, if you only look at the bird, then I agree that the quality of the photo made it very hard. You had to focus on the other clues in the photo, that indicated the sort of habitat that the bird lives in or perhaps doesn’t live in, Fred was obviously expecting that we would do that. I perhaps view things in a similar way to the way that he and @BRACQUENE do.  It’s not all about the bird’s diagnostic features, it’s about everything else in the photo as well and also, I have to say knowing something of the photographer’s travel history. We are after all, trying to identify a bird, without having any of the location information, that we would obviously have, if we were looking at an actual bird, out in the field somewhere. There were enough clues in the photo, for me to conclude that the bird lives in what looks like an arid habitat and thus make an educated guess, one that turned out to be correct, that the region we needed to look at was the Southwest of the US and Northern Mexico, that immediately cut down the number of possible answers from 300+, to only about a dozen at most and some of those could be quickly crossed off. There are of course, arid parts of South America, but I thought North America was more likely and it made sense to look there first, because there so many fewer hummers to choose from. If I were looking at say Peru, even after determining which parts of Peru are arid enough to have that sort of vegetation, I’d still have to go through pages of hummers, trying to pick out the species that live in arid habitats, from all the rainforest, cloudforest and mountain hummers, that I knew this bird could not be, from what the photos were telling me.

 

I therefore think that Fred's reasoning was sound, in thinking that we should be able to get to the answer, from the other clues in the photo. I say all of that even though, I didn’t actually get the right answer. Xantu’s hummingbird is endemic entirely to southern Baja, because of this the authors of the book I was using, Field Guide to the Birds of North America, decided a map was unnecessary, the lack of a map, meant I didn’t pay as much attention to Xantu’s as I should have done, I will admit that that was also in large part because the two birds illustrated in the book, don’t look like the bird in Fred's photo, thus, I suggested other hummers from that general area, having ruled those out, if I had looked at images of Xantu’s online, I probably would have found at least one shot, that would have prompted me to suggest Xantu’s, or I might have suggested it, just by process of elimination, having ruled out everything else. So, while I agree that the photo is poor, I don’t agree that it was a poor choice, because there were enough clues in it, to get me very nearly to the right answer and I assume he thought that those clues, would make up for the poor quality of the image as a bird photo, for some of us they did and clearly for some of us they didn’t. I know from my own photos, that sometimes the bird really doesn't look much like any of the illustrations in the books, for that reason, I should have checked photos online of all the different species, that occur in the area, that I had identified, it would still have been pretty difficult, but not impossible. 

 

I think as I say that the problem in this case, was down to the fact that we do think in different ways, for me a large part of this game, is trying to narrow down which region of the world, the photo might have been taken in, to do that I study the entire photo, not just the bird, to look for any hint, regarding the habitat, at the same time taking into account, what I think I know about the photographer’s travels. This in combination with what I suppose birders would call the jizz of the bird, often helps me to determine which book to look at first, if I have the right book, I think I’m perhaps rather better at using this approach than some, in part because I’ve had the privilege of birding on six continents and have lots of books, this is a big advantage. I’m certainly not always right, sometimes the background offers no useful clues and I can’t determine which region a bird is from, or I maybe I think I can but actually I’m wrong and sometimes as mentioned previously with regard to larks and pipits, these families occur on two continents and in much the same sort of habitat on each. I recently posted a thrush and they occur on five continents, had that been someone else's photo, I would likely have struggled with it, certainly if I hadn't seen thrushes on five continents.  

 

Anyhow, I hope we can put this disagreement behind us and move on.  

[Soukous]

21 minutes ago, inyathi said:

Anyhow, I hope we can put this disagreement behind us and move on. 

 

I'll second that sentiment. and let's try and maintain a sense of humour too. 

For all his skill as a birder ( and it is something I am in awe of) he has never claimed to be the world's best photographer.