Friday, August 27, 2010

Not so odd after all?

An update about the id of the Tyrannus kingbirds that I photographed some weeks ago in the lookout of the Metropolitan Natural Park. The discussion about its identity in ID Frontiers and through private messages to Ken Allaire (who posted the information in the first place at the forum) brought some interesting candidates, including Snowy-throated and White-throated Kingbirds, with the latter being the most favored... until Chris Benesh joined the discussion. He, nicely, pointed out that all the features that made odd the kingbirds at the photos are perfectly explained by them being juvenile Tropical Kingbirds, instead of a flock of way-too-lost adults kingbirds from South America. I have to admit that the simple idea of dealing with such a great occurrence of a bird never ever reported out of South America was overwhelming, but I consider that Chris made an excellent analysis and that he is right. After all, in the medical field we say that "the rare manifestations of common diseases are MORE common than the common manifestations of rare ones". Apply it to birds and then we get a flock of juvenile Tropical Kingbirds confusing some birders! As I posted, we failed in relocate the flock of kingbirds at the site the days following the first observation, and all the photos (kindly shared by Osvaldo Quintero) of those days showed "typical" Tropical Kingbirds in all sort of ages (including the young bird of the last photo which exhibits all the features of "typical" Tropical Kingbirds).
I'm grateful with all of you who contribute in resolving this mystery, this surely was a great experience.

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