GAME: name that bird!

[inyathi]

When I decided to post this one I had to do a bit of checking myself just to make sure I'd identified it correctly as this is quite a challenging family of birds and I did see some silmilar species on the same trip, I was just beginning to try and think up some suitable clues to help with this one but it seems I don't need to, well done @@janzin you hit the nail on the head.

 

It is indeed a stripe-cheeked greenbul Andropadus milanjensis photographed at Seldomseen in the Bvumba Mountains in the Eastern Highlands of Zimbabwe, in the Birds of Africa South of the Sahara these greenbuls have been split into several species and this one is restricted to mountains in Eastern Zimbabwe, Northern Mozambique and Southern Malawi.

 

Back over to you janzin I'll have to look for something even harder for next time.

[janzin]

Wow @@inyathi I'm rather surprised that I got it right but I do confess I did some sleuthing, and I need to confess my method. First I clicked through to your flickr page and I saw that it was shot in Sept 2013. I noticed on that page that you had another bird also shot on that same date which happened to be from Zimbabwe so I knew right away it was a Southern African bird since it was doubtful you could be in two places at once! So I paged through my Birds of Southern Africa, first looking in the thrushes because it seemed like a thrush-like bird. Nothing there with a white eye-ring so I kept looking and found the Greenbuls. Aha there were a couple with White-eye rings or partial eye-rings and I was down to Yellow-streaked or Stripe-cheeked. I then made sure those were found in Zim and in the montane forest because the leaves in the photo looked deciduous and so it would seem like a forest bird, not rainforest.

 

In fact I first wrote Yellow-streaked but then I decided to zoom in further on the bird which I did by downloading it to my desktop and then in my editing program I zoomed into the face. Aha then I could see there are faint streaks in the face so I changed my entry to Streak-cheeked!

 

But if I hadn't seen that other bird on your page that was taken on that exact same date in Zim I might not have even known what continent to start in.

Edited November 15, 2015 by janzin

[inyathi]

@@janzin Very clever I hadn’t actually considered that, I was thinking that perhaps in future I should just confirm if someone gives the right answer and not say where the photo was taken if it’s somewhere I haven’t written a report about. When I’m posting photos I always try to post one that’s not from the same place as the last one but I don't have enough photos from everywhere I've been so eventually I have to revisit the same places, so I’m sure after a while people will remember where I’ve posted birds from before, I can’t really hide where I have been. You said it’s not possible to be in two places at once don’t be so sure, much as I love travelling I’ve grown tired of all these long haul flights and decided to invent a teleportation device which will allow me to visit Africa, Asia, the Americas or wherever I choose all in the same day thus in future your sneaky trick won’t work.

 

 

[janzin]

>>perhaps in future I should just confirm if someone gives the right answer and not say where the photo was taken

 

well, that would be no fun--part of this whole exercise is learning about new birds in different parts of the world. I don't think what I did was much different than someone going back to see where someone had traveled or posted trip reports from. There are no real rules, its all in fun! I know I'm at a disadvantage with all the posts from Asia and Australia because I don't own the field guides. But others may be at similar regarding the Americas or Africa.

 

Anyway I'm still trying to find something challenging but I am running out of ideas lol. I'll post something soon....

Edited November 16, 2015 by janzin

[janzin]

Try this one:

 

[lmSA84]

@@janzin - I've got about 5 birds in mind for this one! Good choice but I think that the topography might be the give away - is it a Coastal Miner?

[janzin]

@ImSA84 you got it! Yes, a Coastal Miner, endemic to Peru and as you note, usually found on the beaches. Can't stump you folks!!

[inyathi]

Don’t worry I will keep keeping providing information on where my photos were taken, as well as learning about the birds I like to provide a place name then if it’s somewhere I haven’t written about anyone who’s interested at least has a name they can look up.

 

@@janzin As you say there aren’t any real rules, there’s nothing wrong with how you identified my bird at all, if I’d thought of it I would have done exactly the same. With your bird I didn’t get there as quickly as @@lmSA84 but to be more specific were you in the Pucusana area of Peru when you took the photo of the coastal miner on say August 5^th 2005 perhaps?

 

Successfully using a bit of educated guesswork or detective work to correctly establish the general location is really quite satisfying. I’ve decided though that if I find the exact same photo with the name of the bird as I did once with one posted by @@kittykat23uk after educated guesswork took me to her trip report I won’t post the answer. I still want to make the final identification myself the satisfaction of picking the right one out of the book or getting a match through Google is a big part of the fun, if I’ve effectively just looked up the name then really I’ve cheated myself.

 

[lmSA84]

Thanks @@janzin

 

It was over 10 years ago now but I spent 6 weeks travelling around Peru, I didn't get any photos half as good as yours but I loved it.

 

Let's see how many minutes it takes people to guess this one

 

 

Edited November 16, 2015 by lmSA84

[inyathi]

@@lmSA84 is it a grey trembler Cinclocerthia gutturalis?

[lmSA84]

@@inyathi - you got it! By my count that took 48mins

[inyathi]

@@lmSA84 I was tempted once I’d worked it out to wait and see if anyone else would go for it, as I suspect that some folks might not have even seen that you’d posted the next bird, but as you wanted to know how long it would take I decided I would go for it.

 

When I first saw the photo I thought what the heck is that, that’s an interesting bird I have never seen one of those or anything that really looks quite like it I was momentarily stumped. However, I knew it wasn’t African and was confident it wasn’t Asian either, so I briefly considered Australasia, but I quickly ruled that out, this really just left the Americas, but I knew I hadn’t seen anything quite like it in South America and a quick check of the book confirmed, that I hadn’t just overlooked one of the many species I've never seen.

 

At this point I decided to do what @@janzin did with my last bird, with photos posted on Flickr it shows the shooting date under the photo so anyone can see that, so I wanted to see if I could find the shooting date for any photo that’s been posted. Having found the date I then looked for anything you’d written or any other photos you’d posted, I found a photo which confirmed that it had to be from the Americas and then I remembered your solitaire from earlier. Seeing that that bird was from St Lucia, I Googled images of St Lucia birds, as I don’t have any Caribbean books and that gave me the answer straight away. Obviously it helps considerably that St Lucia only has 177 species, an image search for Peruvian birds might not have given me the answer quite so fast, if at all, with a less distinctive bird. If I’d remembered your solitaire photo sooner I would have got there much quicker I didn’t need to work out how to find the shooting date I should have just assumed that it was most likely also from there, the birds’ large bill is so distinctive that I knew it must come from somewhere I’ve never been. Until I saw your photo I wasn’t even aware that such a bird existed that’s the great thing about this game.

 

Going back through this game in several earlier posts, I expressed concern that changing this game to worldwide birds, would make it too hard that might have been true at the time, but it’s certainly not true now. Choosing the next bird to post, took me somewhat longer it’s seems it’s getting harder and harder to find anything, that is really going to be a bit of challenge although I think I’ve still got a couple of very hard ones up my sleeve. The only trouble is while I always make sure any photos I put online are labelled correctly, most of the photos stored on my various hard drives aren’t actually labelled at all, so if it’s a hard one, I often have to find the relevant bird list to confirm what the bird is, before considering posting it.

 

Even being able to teleport myself to other parts of the world to obtain photos of new birds takes time so here’s the next one to have a go at, taken today at least according to Flickr

 

 

 

Edited June 27, 2020 by inyathi

[janzin]

I'm not ready yet to take a stab at that one. Just want to say that I didn't even see the previous post before @@inyathi nailed it! 48 min LOL. You gotta be quick, I think I might have gotten that one, having been to St. Lucia myself

 

Now this one, I don't have a clue....yet...

[kittykat23uk]

Could it be streaked laughing thrush?

[inyathi]

That didn’t really take that long; @@kittykat23uk I thought that you would be the most likely person to get this bird as it’s a Himalayan species basically just found in the mountains from Nepal across northern India as far as Uzbekistan and in Pakistan and Afghanistan. I thought that you might have seen this bird or if not that you might work out that it’s a laughingthrush and you should then have the right books to find the species having been to India a few times.

 

Streaked Laughingthrush Garrulax lineatus in the Himalayas above Corbett NP in Uttarakhand India

 

Over to you.

[Soukous]

@@kittykat23uk @@inyathi as always, I am in awe of your ID skills but I do wonder whether you get any work done.

[lmSA84]

@@kittykat23uk - that is awesome knowledge! I was wasting my time staring at woodcreepers, hoping that one of them would have a short straight bill

[kittykat23uk]

Thanks, well when I saw the bird I thought it looked like the right size and shape for a laughingthrush and also looked like a more temperate background, with the climbing rose in the picture. So I looked in Grimmett and inskipp and there's really only one laughingthrush that has that distinctive chestnut wing and the chestnut ear coverts with the streaky grey plumage elsewhere. I then checked up on my trip to Pangot and indeed I have also photographed this species there. let's try this trio:

Untitled by Jo Dale, on Flickr

[janzin]

You'd think such a distinctive looking bird would be easy but I'm having no luck!

[Soukous]

Ditto

no vegetation to provide assistance either

[inyathi]

Normally I have to spend a bit of time trying to work out what sort of bird it is or where it might be from but not in this case, I decided as soon as saw this photo that I wouldn’t go for it as new exactly what they are. My immediate thought was that I’ve seen this bird and I even got a photo I just need to check the book to make sure I’ve got the right name. Well it turns out I was wrong I haven’t seen this bird after all, because I’ve never been to the country that these birds are in, there are just two species in this genus and that's why I thought I'd seen this bird because I have seen the other one, the crested .......... in a near neighbouring country. If I’d jumped straight in with a name I might well have given the wrong one it just goes to show that you need to make sure that you’ve really have had a proper look before deciding on an ID, clearly these birds don’t have crests and there are other differences, but then my photo is nothing like as good as this one so I hadn’t noticed how different they are. Having given a bit of a clue which may or may not help I will leave @@kittykat23uk to give further clues and pass on this one, otherwise if I always keep answering I’ll run out of birds to post.

Edited November 20, 2015 by inyathi

[offshorebirder]

Very altruistic of you @@inyathi. But I'm not going to spend the time sleuthing on this one.

 

By the way - is this the longest thread on ST? Must be darned close if it is not the longest...

[janzin]

Okay, thanks to @@inyathi's hint I think I have it. But I wouldn't have found it without the hint!

 

Collared Finchbill Spizixos semitorques

[kittykat23uk]

A good team effort . Well done @@janzin for guessing the birds and to @@inyathi for pointing people in the right direction; indeed these are collared finch bills taken in Dujaingyang in Sichuan province, China at around this time last year as we were visiting the new Giant Panda base there. This is getting more and more difficult to find a really challenging subject...

[janzin]

Well its getting more and more difficult to find something worthy! I'm not sure if this is going to be too easy or two challenging. My guess is you folks are just too good and it will be minutes before someone get it . But here goes, something a little different this time.