Sunday, June 6, 2010

Western Tanager

I saw this bird along the central service road at TRNWR. I hadn't a clue as to what is was, however a Red-winged Blackbird was sitting in an adjacent tree to where this bird was sitting allowing me to know that it was comparable in size. I was able to get six pictures of it before it flew off. Unfortunately, it was a gloomy day and the bird was a fair distance away so the pictures where not the best, but still plenty good enough for identifying. But when I loaded the images onto my computer and started paging through my field guide and searching on the web, I came up empty. In fact, I gave up on it and its been sitting on my computer in a folder named "????" since May 31.
Then, this morning, I was reading Greg Gillson's account of his trip to Malheur NWR in SE Oregon and came across a picture he had taken there of a female Western Tanager. When I saw it, I immediately thought of this bird that I had seen a week before. After some review of the pictures and some research, I am pretty comfortable that this is a female Western Tanager.

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