10-05: Random Birds, February 2026, with Ted Floyd

spot polar bears and scan for puffins in Norway, sip wine and watch the photo dancers world to Portugal's traditional music. After observing great bustards in the rolling fields, tread lightly on a camping trip through Kenya's savannas and forests, discover New Zealand's many endemics or marvel at Australia's prehistoric cassowaries while learning about Aboriginal history and dream time with all for birding. Travel is larger than lifers all for birding.com. Hello and welcome to the American Birding Podcast from the American Birding Association. I am your host, Nate Swick. We've got an update to the ABA checklist in the last week. I know, I know it's not quite as exciting as the eBird checklist updates. That's where you keep all your lists. That's where I keep all my lists. But the ABA checklist is still important because it informs the way that we talk about birds at this organization. And I'd still like to think that that's reasonably influential. Anyway, the big news in the update, well, relatively speaking, of course, is that we have finally started to move away from the AOS North American Classification Committee and align more with Ebert, at least partially. We accepted to the ABA checklist two splits that have not yet, yet's important. I think they probably will be approved eventually by the AOS. Those are two splits that eBird brought to us this summer. Two splits that birders have had on their radar for a while. That is Wimbrel split now into Hudsonian Wimbrel in the Americas and Eurasian Wimbrel in, well, Eurasia. birders in the u.s and canada and elsewhere have been keeping track of old world wimbrels for quite a while now it's a pretty straightforward identification the second is the yellow warbler split which was recently made into the very familiar nominate birds that will now be known as northern yellow warbler and the texas and florida subspecies the range restricted subspecies now called mangrove yellow warbler. A couple of other eBird slash Clements related issues that were updated or taken on by the ABA checklist. Fayez Petrel is now Desertus Petrel in the ABA area. We decided not to go along with the slash. I'm pretty sure eBird decided against that too. There are actually a couple potential Cape Verde Petrel records in the ABA area that will be evaluated later by local authorities and then passed on to the ABA checklist committee. And then there's the whole stone chat thing. The ABA is not going with Clements, which split Asian stone chat into Amor and Siberian stone chats. Avalis did not split the species, which I thought would mean that Ebert would relump them, which is kind of weird given it was only about a year and a half after they split them. But evidently not. Ebert is sticking with the split. Avalist is going with the one bird. And that means that the ABA checklist committee decided to go with the one bird as well. So that bird, when we talk about it here, any weird stone chats that turn up in Alaska or Texas maybe will be Asian stone chat. Still not entirely sure how that will all shake out. It doesn't really affect me. I've not seen any stone chat in the ABA area. It's real, real inside baseball stuff. I think that's probably the most difficult one for people to get a handle on. Anyway, the important thing to note in all of this, the most important part, is that none of those changes affect Ted Floyd and my continued effort to randomize the birds of Colorado and North Carolina and discuss them, except for the warbler name change. That's relevant because that's the episode I have for you today. Birding editor Ted Floyd and I random some birds all after this week's rare birds. This is your rare bird focus for the end of January, 2026. Late winter is frequently a good time for West Indian vagrants to Florida. And this week saw a spectacular Western Spindalis observed in Miami Dade. The Spindalis are a Caribbean near endemic family of four species, formerly one species called stripeded tanager. If you've got one of those old field guides, But it was split later into four species in Hispaniola, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, and the relatively wide-ranging western Spindalas of Cuba and the surrounding islands, Bahamas, Turks and Caicos, etc. It is a rare visitor to Florida, though it has been more regular in the past. A pair even bred in Florida in 2009. Almost all ABA area records come from Miami-Dade and surrounding counties, though it has been seen as far north as Indian River County and even one record on the Gulf Coast as well, near Tampa. The last couple weeks have seen a pair of notable crested caracara records in the U.S., one from Cowley County, Kansas, the state's third, and another from Baltimore, Maryland, that state's second. You might remember Alex Lamoureux talking earlier this year about potential for crested caracara extralimital records. Always a bird to watch out for. It can pretty much show up just about anywhere. Those are the rarity highlights for the period for the full list of rarities from around the ABA area. check out the ABA Rare Bird Alert on Fridays at aba.org slash RBA. You can also follow along with all the rare bird news in our ABA Rare Bird Alert group on Facebook and on ABA community. I have a list of birds. I have a random number generator and I have birding editor Ted Floyd with me for another edition of our ongoing and perhaps never ending series, random birds wherein we, I don't know, it says it right on the tin. We pick a bird, we talk about it. Ted, how are you doing? It's good to see you again. I'm doing fine. It's good to see you again, Nate. Happy New Year. Happy New Year to you. I have a bit of a cold. I think my head is, I'm clear thinking even if I'm the season. Even if I have a head cold. So apologies to our listeners if I sound a little funny, perhaps especially as the minutes wear on here. But it's great to see you and a Happy New Year back to you and a Happy New Year to everybody out there. the people on the listening end of this may not suffer as much as I will. I'm going to try and cut out most of the extra noises that Ted may make over the, over the course of our talk here, but you'll, you'll have to deal with it. That'll all be on my end. But is your 2026 list off to a good year? Have you seen some interesting birds here? It's been pretty quiet here. I've been snowed in actually. That's right. And if I'm not mistaken, do you have another big system? We'll see. We'll see. By the time this podcast airs, maybe snowed in once more. I saw, especially coastal, like Hatteras is supposed to get quite a bit of snow, which really surprises me. We'll see if it comes to pass. Maybe it'll just be a breezy day. But no, I have gotten off to a good start. I went up to Olympia, Washington to see relatives and go birding. That'll do it. That'll do it. And then I turned right around and went to Orlando, Florida for the Space Coast Birding Festival. Oh, that's right. You were there. We talked about that last time. That's right. Which is out of Cape Canaveral. So from Olympia to Cape Canaveral, sort of the opposite extremes almost, lower 48. But one commonality there was scrub jays. California scrub jays are at the northern extreme of their range in Olympia. I'm surprised they're up there, actually. Well, their range is expanding. Yeah, I would think so. I believe that's a fairly new thing up there. And then, of course, Florida scrub jays in and around Cape Canaveral. So that was a neat commonality. Yeah, two more corners left to go. you need to pick up Island Scrub Jay in Southern California. And then unfortunately, no Scrub Jays in Maine. No, I'll look for those funny dark Eastern Canada Jays instead. That's right. Close enough. They like scrubs well enough. What we do in this podcast for people who may not know is that I have a random number generator. I click it. Every bird has a number. We talk about the birds. I do want to juice it a little bit before we get going on this because 2026 is, as our listeners almost certainly know, the year of the horned lark here at the ABA. That is our bird of the year for 2026. We were going to do a lot of horned lark content over the year, both in the magazine and perhaps here on this podcast as well. I've already kind of given my thoughts on horned lark early on in the first episode of the year when we interviewed Christina Kinnicki, who is the bird of the year artist this year. But I feel like I should ask you, Ted, what are your thoughts on horned lark, both as a bird of the year and just as a bird general, I imagine it's one of those species that you see a lot of in a lot of different circumstances out west in the Rockies. Sure. Yeah, so I think I'll maybe package those two questions you had into a single response because for me, the bird of the year and what I feel, at least with regard to this species, are very, very similar because I do live around horned larks and it is a great bird. It's a wonderful bird of the year and it's wonderful bird of the year art. and sort of all those things to me are maybe sort of, as I said, part of a package deal. But yeah, there's just like so many wonderful paradoxes about the horned lark, especially in the West. It's just, you know, this super abundant bird. I realize that in the East, it's much scarcer. In fact, some of the Northeastern, Northeastern U.S. populations are in serious decline right now. But I heard a quip years ago from Rick Wright that has always stuck with me. He said, it's the most common bird you never knew. That's exactly right. What he means, he's talking about, you know, for folks who aren't really enmeshed in the birding way. But, you know, I think of like how, especially where I live in eastern Colorado, if you were like a, well, let's say doing deliveries, you know, a milk truck driver in eastern Colorado, you could go decades with seeing like literally probably millions of horned larks and never know the name of the bird. Yeah, because it's just out there. There's kind of a little bit farther away than you can make out detail on. And there's big flocks flying up in the winter and, you know, who would want to get out of their truck just to look at a flock of quote-unquote boring brown birds are of course intricately beautiful up close so it just fascinates me that the bird is like so common and really so beautiful and so little known because if you're you know if you're 300 feet away from them in a speeding vehicle they're just quote-unquote sparrows yeah but but they're so beautiful if you see them at all yeah if you know or yeah i guess like it's like it's like it's like see and notice you know what i mean like you see them out there but you notice them like yeah it's sort of maybe a funny fade into the background yeah yeah for sure it's not always an easy bird to see too you know my own encounters with them are frequently flying over or kind of the you know they've got that kind of tinkly song that you hear kind of at the edge of your hearing even when there could be right in front of you it's kind of spare um it's yeah it's a bird that's so easy to overlook that that's so true something else about the horned lark that i think applies to most of us now you'll probably prove me wrong when I say this, but I find that for most birders, even though, you know, after you've been doing it for a long time, it's just such a common bird, especially in the West. Like we go years before we see our first one. And I talked to a lot of people who like, they didn't see their first horned lark till they've been birding for, you know, four or five or 10 years. You know, they'd seen like lots of cool birds and maybe they'd gone to Costa Rica, but they still hadn't seen a horned lark. And by the way, I totally qualify for that. And I remember my first horn, I'd been birding for like a solid five years, actually. And I remember a brutally cold day in Indiana County, Pennsylvania, with two old birding friends of mine, Ed Quader and Mark Vanderben. And we were just out looking for, there'd been like an influx of short-eared owls out there in their day, a northern shrike reported. And we came upon horned larks. That was the first time I'd ever seen them. And that was like the highlight of the day. I mean, don't get me wrong, short-eared owls are cool and northern shrikes are cool. But larks were just, they were tinkling and musical. And it was a brutally cold day, but there was just brilliant sunshine and deep snow. And they just sort of glittered in the snow. Golden yellow snowflakes or something like that. And again, since then I've seen, I'm not exaggerating, probably a million horned larks. But I had to go like a long time before I saw my first one. It is a bird that really benefits from a close look too. I mean, it's one thing to see a flock of horned larks 100, 200 meters across an agricultural field, but it's another thing to see those things walking around very close to you. They do have that really cool pattern, the kind of yellow that is, it's incredible how it can disappear into the background. A bird that is so strongly patterned and so colorful in a lot of ways, but it's stuff you don't always notice when you look at them. they really it's always memorable to get a to get a great look at a horned lark here i'll make a pitch here too for the um the various vocalizations and to me most of all the song of the horned lark and how they sing at night and especially here in colorado around like around the um like the full moon in june especially if it's early june just all night long that the horned larks are uh they're sky they sing from the air actually yeah and uh you know singing you can't see them but you hear them singing high overhead i know that the song isn't quite as great as the song of the uh eurasian sky mark or the uh sprang's pivot but um it really is a neat song it's so cool to hear them uh that night and this is the one other thing i'll say about the lark is just um it might be the ultimate surviving survival bird of all the birds in the aba area when i lived in nevada and we would do breeding bird atlas work for them there were blocks breeding bird blocks in Nevada where there was the only bird which horned lark. Every single other bird. I totally believe that. Even like rock red and common raven couldn't be in there. And the blocks there had these marvel, you know, those old USGS survey blocks that had names. They were all named. And remember we had blocks like Plutonium Springs and Dead Cat Canyon and Seeping Sulfur. Just horrible names but there were always horned larks in there. And also we get on Camp Colorado for young birds in Colorado. I get kick out of how the horned lark is probably the most common bird we see on the Pawnee National Grassland, which is this hot, dry, really, almost brutally, you know, sort of inhospitable desert by the time we're out there. And lots of great birds, and lots of fabulous mammals and insects. But like, there are horned larks everywhere. And then we go up to, you know, almost 14,000 feet in Rocky Mountain National Park, and they're up there as well. They're just anywhere that is sort of barren, rocky, seemingly lifeless, they're going to be horned larks Yeah I have one spot and people have probably heard this story and forgive me for repeating it But there one spot on one of my breeding bird surveys where I can almost guarantee born larks I know that they're there every year, but we talked about that the song is kind of easy to miss. If there's too much traffic at that stop on the day that I choose to do the breeding bird survey, I might miss them just because their car is going by and I can't hear them. but it's it's a it's an intersection of two farm roads uh that is uh surrounded on all four corners by like a fallow tobacco field and um there's not a lot of other stuff there i mean there's a little pond that sometimes i can find stuff in the willows around the pond but um it's my horned lark spot and i was a little disappointed when i don't get them i get them probably two out of every three years but um yeah that's that's the bird i look for there yeah and horned lark is a i mean you and I have been talking about the G word good, but it's like a good bird as a breeder. It's a bird I enjoy saying. Yeah. But it's not reasonably good. Overwhelmingly common, right? No. Yeah. I wouldn't say that. Yeah, there are places and there are times where they will congregate, certainly on the eastern third of the state. And this is for South Carolina too, the coastal plain, kind of the agriculture part of the state. That's where I'd look for them. But they'll be in the mountains too sometimes. Sure. And they could be just about anywhere. but low numbers pretty much everywhere too. It's a bird I get excited about seeing when I'm out birding, for sure. All the way back to your question, I just think it's a great bird. I mean, it sort of requires no justification just on the basis of its beauty, its complexity. We haven't talked about geographic complexity at all, but the song, the ecology, and again, just that paradox that lots of other beautiful birds like cardinals and blue jays and robins, and for some reason, I don't know, we noticed them and for some reason with horned larks we tend not to and i think that makes them sort of extra special you know like oh my gosh here's this beautiful bird that for whatever reason i've been paying attention to yeah not enough people birding at plutonium springs i guess well let's uh let's i've finished putting my finger on the dial here let's go to the actual random number generator and see what it has to say let's see what about uh what bird here and it's going to go down to oh i've marked off horned lark now so it's not on the list now it's like 195. And now we have moved to 233, a little bit further down the way. And this is another bird of similar kind of spare, well, not really spare environments, but another fun one, grasshopper sparrow. Yeah, no, I do sort of associate horn larks with grasshoppers. Yeah, similar sort of places sometimes. Yeah, certainly. So, well, the grasshopper sparrow is a sparrow and it's named grasshopper from what I gather indicates the song. Yeah, that's what I've always been told. There's a little bit of like maybe uncertainty about why the bird is so named but I believe it has to do with the song which is exceedingly non-bird like. It's basically this strange sort of gasping buzz. It is at the far reaches of some people's hearing too. Yeah, and sort of a pointed thing for you to say to me. That wasn't intentional. No, no, no, no, no. But I very well remember my first grasshopper sparrow well before I saw my first torn lark. But I was so struck by how, frankly, loud and far-caring the call was. It was true, yeah. Yeah, and I hurried at a distance, and I got closer. I mean, I didn't know what it was. And I was expecting something like, you know, red-winged blackbird size or even bigger. And I just really did not know it turned out to be a grasshopper sparrow. So now to me, the parts of the bird's song that sound the loudest are those little opening notes. You know, the tick-tock-tock-tock. And I joke with people much younger than I, when we're out birding, I always get on the grasshopper sparrow a split second before they do. Because I'm picking up the tick-tock notes and then they hear the loud buzz, which I need to be a little closer to hear that. So it's just kind of funny how we birders adapt. and in my case, to me, it's the bird that gives those now loud tick notes followed by the soft buzz. And if you'd asked me this 30 years ago, I would have talked about the soft tick notes followed by the loudness. Objectively speaking, it is the buzz that's louder, but my ears aren't sensitive to that frequency as they used to be. It's a neat bird. It's a bird that is in places abundant and in many other parts of its range declining. Actually, I will make a shout out here to Florida, where I just was and where the grasshoppers, sorry, the Florida grasshopper sparrow occurs. So that is a Florida endemic, like the scrub jay. It's not considered to be a distinct species, but it is ecologically and genetically distinctive. And fortunately, even though it's, quote unquote, just the subspecies and just a sparrow, the bird has really elicited a lot of sort of attention from not just the Florida birding community, even the, odd to say, but the U.S. Department of Defense is keen on protecting the grasshopper sparrow. We had a great article by Ken Warren with the Department of Defense in Burding a few years ago, and he just really, really got into grasshopper sparrows. Sorry, Ken, if you're out there, I don't actually know what you do with the Department of Defense, but my guess is it's not usually grasshopper sparrows. And it's just really, really cool that somebody with the U.S. Department of Defense was really kind of nerding out about the grasshopper sparrow, and especially that distinctive endemic Florida grasshopper sparrow. Yeah, I actually had a podcast conversation a few years ago, I want to say two or three years ago, with someone from Florida about specifically conservation efforts around the Florida grasshopper sparrow. It's interesting that Florida is, I don't know, it's like ground center, ground zero as the word I'm looking for, another plutonium springs conference. But ground zero for weird amodromus subspecies because, you know, famously dusky seaside sparrow, same one. And there's a couple other seaside sparrow subspecies that are in Florida as well. Cape Sable, right? Cape Sable, that's the one. Yeah, so I don't know what the deal is. Well, I do know what the deal is. Florida is extremely biodiverse. That's what the deal is. But interesting that those three species are down there, one extinct, two critically endangered. Yeah, I had a chance to visit a place I've heard about my whole life, but I'd never actually been to. On the very last day at Space Coast, an old ABA friend of ours, Bill Pranty, took me out to Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge. He showed me the actual sort of last cordgrass meadow where the birds occurred in the wild. That's very mean. Oh, Fridusky seaside sparrow, right? That was a poignant moment. Also, I will say, actually, back to the grasshopper sparrow now. Yeah, and we can talk about seaside sparrow because it's not on the Colorado list. So it's just a small Dakota tangent here. Seaside sparrow is definitely not on the list. This is about grasshopper sparrow, though, and also about scrub jays. And there is a scrub jay in California. Actually, Colorado is a different one. But when we think of the iconic habitats of Florida, so the Everglades, the white sand beaches, obviously. Mangroves. Mangroves swamps. totally i'm with you on that but the um these like dry upland scrubby inland habitats or like the grasshopper sparrows and i'm actually really thinking of the scrub jays where they occur i mean they make me sort of nostalgic for colorado i mean they feel a little bit like yeah like burning these like go for tortoises too right right which is you know basically the east coast version of the of the desert tortoise which is the western u.s version the same species but um Again, I get it. It's Florida. It's not Colorado, but it's traipsing around looking for scrub jays. It made me feel like right back home in Colorado. Yeah. There's that whole story of Florida Cracker. It's essentially like Florida cowboys that were in the central part of the peninsula in the early days. Right. 200, 300 years ago. That was a common lifestyle. Yeah. An endangered human lifestyle as well. Exactly. Threatened and imperiled wildlands as well. But those interior dry, scrubby, hot sort of oak pine habitats. And again, I mean, I get it. I know about them. They exist. But being in them more intensively in the past week than I'd ever been in before was really a pretty impressive experience for me. Yeah, it's interesting to think of grasshopper sparrow sort of in juxtaposition with horned lark because I do kind of think of them very similarly in the sense that they are both reasonably common. birds, uh, throughout, you know, a lot of the, well, I mean, the Eastern part of the continent for grasshopper sparrow, but very easy to overlook. I mean, how many times have I stopped at a, you know, a weedy field of fescue and, um, you know, you hear the grasshopper sparrow sort of at the edge of your hearing. And then when you really start to concentrate, you realize how many there are six to 10, 12, uh, birds, uh, you know, in this one relatively small, a little area, like a hayfield that has not been cut yet. yeah and they don't sound like birds which is you know I guess the point very easy to overlook for people who aren't really paying attention to them another just comment about the grasshoppers going back to horned lark too is it's a habitual night singer perhaps even more than the horned larks but here in Colorado and this totally applies elsewhere in the species range if you're out on a moonlit night in June it's just full of habitat you hear as many grasshopper sparrows out there is certainly more than owls and you know as many like crickets or something i mean they're just so vocal at night uh sort of at the uh like from late late may into maybe early july moonlight helps a lot they like singing on moonlit yeah yeah it's it's a fascinating little bird and and certainly a cute one you know i don't know how much you subscribe to the whole bird borb debate oh they can be very short tail big head big body very round yeah cute thing with a But, you know, plain breast, you know, it's not a bird with a real streaky sparrow, at least not on the front side of it. Big flathead, really uniquely shaped for sparrows, even among amodroma sparrows, which are sort of, you know, streaky, round, I don't know, flat-headed, small-tailed birds just generally. Yeah, especially like a grasshopper sparrow, like front on, like facing you. It's just basically, it's globular. It's like an oval. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. In terms of distribution, it's probably found in almost all of the counties here in North Carolina. It's another bird that I, a lot of my breeding bird survey routes, it's one of the more common sparrows I encounter. I go through a lot of kind of cow pasture sort of habitat and they're just all over the place. I mean, I'll get them at the 50 stops. I'll probably get them on 15 to 20 of them. If there's any sort of pasture land that I'm birding through. So yeah, great bird. Like I remember my first grasshopper sparrow in Missouri. There was a place that we used to go to in Southwest Missouri called the Palmetto Pastures. In the spring, it was exactly what I'm describing there. They were cattle pastures. But you get a nice spring rain, and it's got these ephemeral puddles, these shallow puddles that pop up. And it would attract lots of shorebirds mostly. It was a great place to go get migratory shorebirds. But also open country birds like dick sisal and scissor-tell. and grasshopper sparrows and savannah sparrows. Those are the birds that we'd find in those places. And I remember seeing my first grasshopper sparrow rolling down the road sitting on a barbed wire fence, which is sort of how you encounter them a lot of times. For sure. In Colorado, just real quickly, it's essentially an east of the Rockies bird. I would imagine. For us, right. So just wetter, frankly, more lush habitats. Ones that tend to be available from the front range eastward. but we do get them in hay meadows. It's back up right into the Rockies, but I really associate them with midgrass situations farther east. All right, let's hit the random generator again. We've only gone through two birds. Can you believe it? Oh, all right. We've really taken our time. Anyway, generator says 212. Moving up to, this is a quite uncommon bird where I am, but one that I'm sure you have a lot of experience with in Colorado. it is Townsend's Solitaire. Oh, yeah. So, definitely not in the same habit as that. No, finally. As horned larks and grasshopper sparrows, but it's a land bird, a passerine, but yeah, the Solitaire is a bird, essentially, of upland, highland, montane forests in the U.S. and Canada, Mexico, for that matter. So, it's a thrush, you know, related to, the robins, and it's a long, skinny bird with a sort of gray, but with very bold markings, but a gold in the wings and white in the tail. Yeah, a lot of close up the wings and tail. It will go off in a totally non-Colorado or non-North Carolina. Yeah, why not? And just point out that the U.S. state with the great diversity of solitares is Hawaii. Oh, okay. Not birds that are going to show up on either of our state lists. True, but they are two extant species of solitares, and extinct species as well. So in fact, Hawaii is the center of diversity for that genus worldwide. There are other soluteurs. Wait, they're Mayodestes in Hawaii? Yeah. I didn't know that. Oh, I might be wrong. I thought they might have been. Oh, they might be. Well, let's look at something like the Omao, which is, let's look it up here. So the Omao is, yeah, it's Mayodomestes obscurus. And then the Pua Iwi, which is a rare bird, is Mayodomestes pommari. I guess I'd never considered it. And the experience of seeing Real Mal, which I have, is it's very Townsend Solitaire-like. It's sort of just a bird up in the dark woods, high mountains, with really cool sort of spooky vocalizations. The Townsend Solitaire, back to the bird at hand here, is a bird of western montane forests, but it's a powerful migrant and one that gets lost and does vagrate far east. And there are a few every single year, well east of, way east of Colorado, eastern seaboard. Yeah, a lot of them in the kind of northeast and Great Lakes. Right. And that kind of makes sense. The birds range, you know, does get fairly far north, actually. And, yeah, birds just sort of wandering eastward and, you know, wind up in New York or somewhere like that every year. North Carolina. Vocalizations are just so cool. It has this wild, warbling song. but also this tooting whistle that we like to call it the poor man's pig meow because it sounds really similar to the normal tooting of a northern pig meow Does it attract angry chickadees You know I often thought about that I think chickadees know the difference. It's just that the species that doesn't know the difference is overzealous birders on big days. So you get out of the car and you hear this tootling, you're pig meow. Well, actually, that might be just another solitaire. really really cool thing about Townsend Solitaire songs is that there's this seasonality who sings so in the breeding season males are singing to defend territories but in the winter the females sing to defend winter feeding territories against males and other females and they're hyper aggressive in the winter and you'll get these like I call them food fights three or four or five solitaires just going bonkers on each other chasing each other off I've seen like collision, birds flying into each other, you know, get out of my juniper patch. And from what I understand, they can't be sexed in the field. The males and females are the same. But it's been shown that the female solitaires are aggressive and highly vocal during the winter season when they're defending territories. And then when the breeding season starts, the females become less vocal. That's interesting. Yeah, we have, I want to say, two maybe records. I remember the first one because I went after the very first one. It was at Grandfather Mountain in western North Carolina. Interesting that a bird from the mountains of western North America would turn up in the mountains of western North Carolina. I'm sure it felt quite at home. I very clearly recall watching this Townsend Solitaire sitting on top of a spruce tree, sallying out and catching insects. And there were some red squirrels. We have red squirrels in the high mountains up there. and they were hanging around and the ravens and all sorts of birds that you would associate with the Rocky Mountains as well. And that kind of neat, narrow band of high mountain spruce fur forest in the high southern Appalachians. Yeah, it was Grandfather Mountain. A friend of mine is actually one of the executive director of the Grandfather Mountain. Hi, Jesse. I don't know if he listens, but he got us in. I took my kids. it's usually like kind of a steep admission price to get in there that's cool stuff up there they got like a suspension bridge and a zoo and all sorts of stuff it's kind of a very touristy place but it would that was where the bird turned up and that's where all the birders went to go see it and I want to say we got another one in the years since this was probably oh geez it was probably about 12 years ago now but yeah yeah it looked for all the world like like Colorado well we were on the highest mountain. There were no other high mountains, but the forest around it looked very much like the Rocky Mountains or what I recall as the Rocky Mountains. Nice place for a solitaire. It's so cool how vagrants to the east have a way of finding the right habitat. When I think about records in the east of rock rins, they're always in a pile of rocks. But even if it's landscaping, they still find their way to the quote-unquote correct habitat. And solitaires have a way of doing that as well. Hey, let's talk about the bird's name. So I'm really townsend out of it for now, but I'm talking about solitary. JKT? Oh, no. Yeah, it's just such a great name. They're so like aloof and standoffish. They seem to hate each other. You just like always see one solitary, except when they're fighting. That's true. But if you see a bird on a distant, really tall spruce or fir in Colorado, It's guaranteed it's either going to be an all-sighted flycatcher or a town solitaire. And the other species are like that, too. My limited experience with the Omao in Hawaii is that it's a very solitary bird. And then the neotropical solitaires are really solitary. Yeah, they are. Just an example of how ornithologists can come up with great names. Solitaire is a really, really good name for that bird. And as to the bird's first name, not so. There's some other options. There's some other options, for sure. But no, the town in Solitaire is a great bird, despite its unfriendly behavior. It's a very, very solitary behavior. It's just such a thrill to see one. I'm sure the Mexican Spanish name is Northern Solitaire, Solitaire Norteno. Oh, that would make sense. Northern Solitaire, to be honest. It's kind of boring, but appropriate. Juniper Solitaire is one that I've heard as an option, too, because they do like juniper berries. They are defenseless against the charms of juniper berries. Who among us isn't. Who among us isn't. You know, we had one that stayed in our yard for three winters. And every year, it just depleted the junipers. You know, at the beginning of the winter, there were, I don't know, 25,000 juniper berries in the tree. And by the end of the winter, they were all gone. And we didn't have waxwings or bears or anything else. So it was just like one waxwing eating, sorry, one solitaire eating nothing but juniper berries. finally i will comment on the um incredibly valuable identification tip which is the way they fly they have this really unique like i can't think of any other bird in the ab area like this twisting turning um i don't know that like they can't fly in a straight line maybe probably it's a it's a strange like you know forget that saying you know the way the crow flies you know A solitaire flies every which way. It's like the tail's going one way and one wing. I know their wings beat in unison, but it looks like they don't beat in unison. And they're just always, I feel like a flycatcher flying out to a perch. But that lasts like two seconds. Whereas a juniper crossing a huge, sorry, a solitaire crossing a huge clearing, it just flies that way the whole time. So the twisting, turning, erratic flight of the towns in solitaire is just such a distinctive. it's a way to confuse occipiters or cooper socks or yeah you know they're flashing those um yeah the right orange yeah yeah i wonder if that gets like an advertising i'm totally conjecturing here but maybe that has something to do with like showing off those field marks so um ted you were with me when i saw my very first towns in solitaire by the way oh was this at garden of the gods it It was Garden of the Gods, yeah, for the AVA. The AVA was still in Colorado Springs, and we all came up for a staff retreat. This was many, many years ago, maybe more than 10. And yeah, we went birding at Garden of the Gods, and Towns of Solitaire was one of the new birds I got that day. Yeah, that's an excellent spot for finding Towns of Solitaire. So Garden of the Gods, for those of you all who aren't in Colorado, is a gorgeous park. Yeah, it's beautiful. And right in Colorado Springs, which is, believe it or not, a huge city right now. And just a wonderful example of a private-public partnership. The land was granted by a private interest to the city as just a wild place for the citizens of Colorado Springs in perpetuity. And it's like almost 100 years ago now, in the 1930s, maybe. And now it's an international tourist destination. Yes, fabulous. Rock formations, yeah. I know, especially in summer, because every foreign language known to man is heard in the parking lot because it's just so beautiful. And it's right in the springs. You mentioned the rock formations. This will sound like a very chip on my shoulder, like a Western U.S. kid brother thing to say. But we always joke about it. If this were anywhere in the eastern U.S., it would be like the most visited national park. Oh, absolutely. Not a question. It's just so beautiful. but it's full of junipers and therefore full of towns and solitures where were they like in kind of a cold dreary sort of snowy sleety morning I remember you being sort of apologetic that it wasn't that great of a burning morning but I got like three lifers yeah I was going to try to guess I'd have to go back and look canyon red white dotted swirder there's a prairie falcon there's just a suite of species that are, or juniper titmouse. Yeah, I think that was it. I think that was juniper titmouse. Right, you go to Garden of the Gods for like, you know, pretty predictable array of like a half dozen quote-unquote good Western birds and the thousand solitaires. Yeah. Oh, and another solitaire Floyd-Swick connection. Ted, I was with you when we saw, was it brown, brown-backed, brown-breasted? The Guatemala solitaire. Right, yeah, brown-backed, right? Brown-backed, brown-backed solitaire in Guatemala, too. Yeah, that's the board with that just incredible twangy musical. Water falling across broken crystal glass. Whatever metaphor comes to mind. And it goes on and on and on and on. You can think it has to end, but it just goes on and on, right? Yep, absolutely. All right, so definitely not solitaire when we see solitaires. Ted and I. All right, let's hit the next number. 218. Boy, we're just jumping straight down. Yeah, this is a very similar species, at least uh an appearance um sage thrasher another uh resident to colorado and vagrant too yeah yeah another right exactly another bird sort of like this broadly similar sort of like migration and distribution and vagrancy aspect to it so not really a thrasher sage thrasher that's right yeah so the sage thrasher is a mockingbird yeah and uh its old name was the mountain mockingbird, which is a wonderful name. Not really mountains, but it's evocative. Well, it's in mountainous habitats. Yeah. Okay. Sorry. Mountainous landscapes. Yeah. There you go. So, you know, it seems like in Ponderosa Pine Forest with solitares, but definitely in that broad, like intermountain west, arid landscape. Dry, brushy, beige. Yeah. Yeah, I hear you. Arid, austere. Yeah, that's what I think. Mountain landscapes. As its name suggests, it is quite partial to sagebrush. Although also a greasewood, rabbit brush, you know, other sort of shrubs of the mountains, sorry, the highlands in the interior west of the United States. But more of a mockingbird than a thrasher. It's smaller than our other thrashers and not as long-billed. Yeah. as a song to me that is, I guess, maybe more Thrasher-like than Mockingbird-like, but Thrasher's and Mockingbird sort of sound similar to one another. It's a real favorite of mine because it's one of our first signs of spring. You know, spring comes so late for the Rockies, frankly, but the first stage, Thrasher's, they'll be showing up, not where I live in Boulder, but like in the southern parts of the state by the end of next month, by the end of February. So they get in really, really... Well, this month, because this podcast comes out. Oh my gosh, okay, so this will come out in February. We'll be recording in the last days of January. Okay, fair enough. very good so at the end of this month but um they get back to their you know sagebrush and rabbit brush and greasewood breeding habitats and right away they set up shoppers singing like crazy they just go on and on and on they have a very um disorganized run-on song you know like uh well brown thrasher in the east has those couplets yes and on like curve regimented always throws in those weak notes and to me like if the thrasher just goes on and on and on like no pattern at all like you've probably got a sage thrasher there. Nathan Peeple if he's listening would probably disagree and say that there's some you know pattern. Every 14th note is up slurred or something like that but yeah to me the sage thrasher is the bird just goes on and on and on and on and yeah I always do sort of smile when I think of that connection with the mockingbird because they do have some mockingbird like tendencies. Yeah I remember the first time I ever saw a Sage Thrasher. It was on a trip out west in Wyoming, in the middle of Wyoming. Oh, that's perfect. Yeah. Yeah. It's sort of why I think beige when you think of Sage Thrasher because we pulled over at some rest stop on our way from, I don't know, flew into Denver and we're driving to Yellowstone and somewhere in the middle of Wyoming. And there was a Brewer Sparrow and there was a Sage Thrasher. So I got two lifers right there. Boom, boom. Yeah. Those are two sagebrush specialists in Wyoming, for sure. For sure. And yeah, it is a bird that has turned up in North Carolina a small handful of times. It is another species that I have seen in the far west of the state, not in a habitat that looks in any way like the habitat that you find sage thrashers in in the west. This bird was on the campus of a college, and I forget which one. It might have been Warren Wilson. I can't remember. I went out chasing it with my friend Scott Winton and Natalia Campopanuela, who I think listened to this podcast. So hi to you guys. And we stood around and it was wet. It was nasty. It was raining. We stood around this gigantic tangle of sumac and mulberry and multiflora rose that this bird had been seen in, waiting for this bird to kind of pop up in time for us to see it. We did see it. um it was it was a cow field there was manure everywhere it was not the best birding experience but we did get a state bird then we went to go get mexican food which is a happy ending to the story happy ending to the sage thrasher adventure um yeah yeah not a bird that shows up here very often no no i want to say fewer than 10 but more than like three yeah i would think yeah i'm with you on the fewer than 10 even though i don't know what i'm talking about but i just i'm surprised it's a guess it's a 10 or more records for yeah for north carolina um sometimes you and i talk about birds that are surprisingly similar to birds that you would never really even think of and um sage thrasher has a doppelganger to me and it's american now a pivot walking on the ground like what doesn't look like a thrasher at all and a thrasher like teed up on the sage where singing is not going to be confused with a pivot but in migration you mentioned your migration and vagrancy you'll see them like perched on on wire like barbed wires and they can be freakishly similar. Could you just look at the plumage of like a sage thrasher and an American... Like in plumage? Oh, yeah. I see. But, you know, I mean... You've been in profile a little bit. But let's say it's raining. Like you just said, it's gray. You have a bird perched up on a wire. It's not vocalizing. And I'm thinking of a particular story here where we had both species perched side by side. And it's just a funny local story. They're miscaptioned in the journal, I'm thinking. Oh, really? I was like, well, it's kind of understandable. They're acting on all that. Maybe it someone they can tell right from left which I sympathize with That was right That could have just been that they said that before they meant right No the sage thrasher and the American pippet are a surprising species confusion pair you know, especially migrants, spring, dreary weather, not necessarily behaving. You know, behavior usually just separates them immediately. The pippets, you know, walk around and have aerial flight displays, and those sage thrasheres tee up on shrubs and sing forever. So that kind of settles it right away. but just sort of like a dreary, I don't know, sort of cold, wet, migrant birch on a wire. You'd be surprised, I guess I'm saying, how similar they can look to it. I'd have to go back and look at that checklist if we had American Pippa. There you go. Might have been a flyover. It's funny. Ted, I think we got time for one more at least. Oh, yeah, sure. It was good on you. So, yeah. 183. Man, you are clustering around the number 200 there. I know. What is it? It's all passerings this time. This is another one that is a more common vagrant to North Carolina, but definitely a classic bird of Colorado, Western kingbird. Yeah. Let me just... Is there a more Colorado bird? Yeah. And also, is there like a more vagrant to the east? Oh, yeah. As well. I mean, that's a flycatcher. Yeah. Same sweet. Yeah. Yeah. It's one of the most common vagaries. I actually remember when Adrian Disagiri and I were working on some of the language in the natural field guide. I'm not sure I called it a vagrant. I think it's uncommon. I mean, in Florida, it's regular. Right. I thought you should bring up Florida again. I saw Joe Franty a week ago, as I just mentioned earlier. It's always great to get together with Bill because it's sort of like this intensive, what do you really think about X, Y, and Z? The language that we use to describe the status of Florida versus pretty much anywhere in the East. It's a different I mean, there's definitely a sort of a kingbird season, you know, mid-Atlantic, a western kingbird season for sure. So I agree with you that it's a classic Colorado bird. But if you bird enough in the east, you'll find kingbirds in the fall. Oh, yeah. I mean, it's an every year bird here. Often multiple birds in a year. Not always. But, yeah, I mean, every year someone gets them. I mean, I'm sucking it in my state. Yeah. In the East. Yeah, I was going to say for every East, every state. Oh, every state in the East. Oh, yeah. I probably agree with you on that. Maybe a really small state like Rhode Island might be pushing it. But no, they're quite frequent there. As to Colorado, you're right. It's just such a, what would I compare it to back East, a blue jay. Eastern bluebird. Yeah. Even more so, though. Wow, really? They're just everywhere. Now, you need to be in open habitats, but it does not take much. I mean, if you have a paved road going through deep forest and there's just a little clearing at a rest stop, there will be Western kingbirds out there. They are sort of in the solitaire mold, highly aggressive. They're just always fighting with each other. And also with everything else. They chase off hawks and eagles and mammals and people. and they're just so pugilistic, so belligerent. They're just fighting with everything. But one of the very, very first birds to vocalize in the morning, they're singing like crazy by 3.45 in the morning. They go all day long. I mean, they're actually really engaging in that way. There's no siesta time for them. There's no downtime. They're just always present, always vocal. I'll also say, despite their calmness, they're really beautiful. I was going to say, it's a nice-looking bird. If you're going to have a common bird. Yeah, yellow below and that soft gray above, with the contrasting dark tail. Yeah, that black tail with the white edges. Yeah. What's also fun about the king bird compared, let's say another just super abundant bird in Colorado, the magpie. I love magpies, but we have them all year round. And the western kingbirds are completely and utterly absent from late September until late April. And it's always special when the first one shows up. And within 10 minutes, you've seen 10 more. We're like, okay, we're going to have these guys for the next five months, five or six months. But there's something kind of special about seeing the first Western kingbird of the year. A very, very widespread bird in open habitats everywhere. Where do they go in the winter? It's a short distance, relatively short distance migraines. It's like West Mexico, right? Right. Yeah. I can't imagine a place that has incredible concentrations of Western kingbirds. How do they get along with each other? Well, so it's interesting what Eastern kingbirds do. in the winter. So they become peaceful. Yeah, they form these quiet, cooperative, well-behaved flocks of birds. Barely believe it. I know that they are well-organized and well-behaved and cooperative. They feed on trees and stuff like that. So yeah, the behavior of a bird at one time of the year is not necessarily translating to its behavior at another time of the year. Yeah, wild stuff. Yeah, Western Kingbird, like I said, I haven't had one in my county yet, though I think that it's likely, but it is part of that group. It's the most common Western vagrant, aside from Rufus hummingbird to the east. But it's right up there, I think. Yeah, it's funny you mentioned that Rufus hummingbird. I think we definitely did not use the word vagrant to describe the hummingbird. Oh, yeah, I don't think it's a vagrant. And that's a big change. We would have considered it a vagrant if you had written, say, in the 80s or 90s, but especially in the southeast. But in the southeast, it's an uncommon winter bird now where it used to be a rare bird, but no more. All right. Well, that didn't take too long. Let's do one more. Oh, let's do one more. One more, last one, last one. And let's see if you can get away from that number 200. I can't. I'm in 242. We're staying. It's all passerins all the time this time. It's another sparrow, but it's another relatively common. Well, I don't know how common it is in Colorado, but it's quite rare in North Carolina. I've not seen this bird in North Carolina, though I have seen it where I grew up in Missouri. it is uh harris's sparrow big old harris's sparrow king of the zonotrichia king of the zonotrichia is pretty much kind of king of the sparrows it's as hefty as a tohi so it's a great big sparrow as you said it's the zonotrichia so that's in the same genus as the white goat in white round uh sparrows golden crown in the west and by the roof is collared in the uh in the neotropics yep um it is the only bird whose breeding range is uh restricted entirely to Canada. So all other birds have at least a little bit of Alaska or Greenland or somewhere like that, but it is a breeding endemic in Canada. It has a very sweet sort of sad song like the other zona trachea is. And then we don't get them in the summer at all in Colorado, but we get them in fall. They're generally uncommon, but certainly more common in Colorado than in North Carolina. If you're in the far eastern part of the state in maybe October or early November, you might get double digits a day, but it's more common to see one or two. And even west of the foothills of the Rockies, every Christmas count gets a few because they show up at theaters. And in the same way that they winter far to the east on occasion, they always make it farther west as well. When I lived in Nevada, we always found one or two in Reno, and California gets a few every winter as well. So basically a bird of the mid-continent going from central Canada down to central United States. but with a proclivity for vagrancy both east and west and the eastern ones you see in North Carolina from time to time. Yeah very very infrequently it's probably it's a super uncommon bird I can't remember the last one we had it might have been it might have been not all that long ago but it's not a bird that people got excited about it because it had been a while you know just in the winter show up at a feeding station down around Wilmington or somewhere on the coast and you know it gets excited about that. It's interesting that we mentioned that as a you know You are currently sort of in the westernmost point of its wintering range and where I grew up in Missouri. Of its regular wintering range. Yeah. And in Missouri, where I grew up, in southwest Missouri, that was the easternmost point of its regular wintering range. We would see them from time to time. We'd usually have to go west towards like Joplin or towards the Kansas and Oklahoma border. I think of it very much as a, as far as a wintering bird, of course, as like a bird of Oklahoma and northern Texas and Kansas. which is interesting those states don't always have a lot of you know birds that are special to those regions but I think of Harris Sparrow as absolutely as one of them. It's a real mid-continent bird and I'll just make an appeal to it's just flat out like physical beauty. It's a gorgeous bird and it's got you know that the pink bill and that really rich sort of fluffy. Yeah the black and like the golden on the head as well. And then really complex variation in the sexes and ages. And even after all my experiences with Harris's sparrows, we'll sometimes see a bird and I just, is this a female or is it just sort of a pale male? And we see more of them. Oh, so let me back up here. They have a spring molt, so they acquire a brighter, different plumage in April, but they're largely gone from here by then. So we're seeing birds that have undergone their fall molt, which is a That's the complete molt too, but they look different than they do in spring. Yeah, it's one of the few. I think it, is it, there aren't many sparrows that are like that. And I want to say, it might be, is it the only one? I don't want to. No. So, well, no, the thing is, like the others don't trick is do that, but they just don't show. Oh, they look the same. They look the same. Yeah. So, so, so, so the molt schedule is actually quite, quite similar, but they, as opposed to just sort of molting in the same pattern, different patterns. But it gets complicated. You can maybe have three or four Harrison Sparrows lined up at a feeder and like, which one's the male? Which one's the female? Which is the first winter? Which is the after second winter? It gets kind of confusing with Harrison Sparrows. They're so distinctive just on the basis of their size, the big bill, the bill color, that even compared to another big sparrow, like a white-crowned sparrow, they really dwarf them in size. Their head is just massive. That's what I remember them. like you know i think especially yeah white crown sparrow especially can be kind of live sometimes like kind of long and skinny a little bit and maybe that's because they they crane their necks quite often yeah no arrows and sparrows are chunky yeah they're they're big and round yeah and like their head is like a buffalo head or something like that if they're a sparrow um yeah that i mean that's yeah that's that's what's yeah you talk about borbs in connection with them yeah grasshopper sparrows they can be kind of borby too they can be a little borby big borbs or not other beach balls or something. Yeah. Or the beach balls of the sparrows. Yeah. Whereas a grasshopper sparrow is the golf ball of the sparrows. So we've had a couple, you know, eponyms this time around. We've talked about potential names just for Townsend Solitaire. What about for Harris's sparrow? It's not, it's cut and dry. Yeah. Black-faced, but that feels boring. I mean. Appropriate, I guess. One thing, since it's the only Canadian breeder, I mean, I mean, Canadian sparrow, Canada sparrow. Canada sparrow, yeah. I mean, it's better than Canada goose yeah i mean no longer appropriate appropriateness yeah i know that maybe something that celebrates the um the bill color but blackface is um like blackface for again they're not they're not all that dark it doesn't bring me joy yeah yeah um you know they're always in these sort of scrubby habitats they they breed and there's a they breed in scrubby habitats they migrate through scrubby habitat but the problem with a bird like a name like scrubbed sparrow or something would be that there are about 15 other sparrow species yeah so i don't know maybe something that somehow indicates or commemorates the uh the uh special canadian provenance of the um the harris you know uh thomas nuttall called it morning finch the morning sparrow that was because of the sun or because of the dark color of the face great question no idea can't ask him can't ask him no although he might probably he probably wrote it somewhere yeah yeah yeah another another bird that uh that uh jj audubon stole from some previous name yeah yeah um he named it after edward harris um even though it had a name already that's right audubon was good at those um anyway uh aside from that that's that's pretty good we've gone at this for uh not quite an hour i think that's that's pretty good we got five more birds down, 200 and some to go. So we're working our way through. Ted, thank you so much for joining me to talk about some random birds on this random Thursday. And yeah, we'll certainly see you down the road. Always fun. And maybe next time we'll have a non-passerine. Maybe. Fingers crossed. All right. Cool. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it. The American Birding Podcast is brought to you by the American Birding Association. The ABA is, of course, a membership organization. And the best way to support it is to become a member. ABA members get access to all of our fantastic magazines, get access to a lot of our online resources like ABA community and North American Red Bird Alert, and also discounts to all of our partners like Zeiss OM system and video books. You can learn more about all the benefits of membership. In addition to helping support our free resources, like this podcast and what's this bird live at aba.org slash join special shout outs this week to Aiden Mehar of Middletown, Delaware, Kristen Neva of Billings, Montana, and Vern Reinert of Springfield, Illinois, all of whom recently joined the ABA and noted this podcast as a reason for doing so. Thank you so much and welcome to the ABA. Executive director of the ABA and executive producer of this podcast is Wayne Klockner, who noted this week that Sean Bean, Sean Bean, the actor, is now hosting a bird podcast based in the UK. News that I took personally. It is not his, saved by happy chance. It might have been mine. It should have been mine. Give it to me. Give me the podcast. Technical production is by John Lowry, who scoffed at the news. One does not simply walk into podcasting. Additional help comes from Maggie Fitzgibbon, Frankie Zagiri, and Greg Neese, who sees reconciliation. One day our past will lead us there. And the Tower Guard will take up the call. The Lords of Bird Podcasting have returned. You can find us online at aba.org. On social media, most everywhere is American Birding Association. On Blue Sky, we are at ABAbirds. Questions, comments can come to podcast.aba.org. I'm Nate Swick. Thanks so much for listening. I'm Brad Like Tom, and we'll be back next week.