Not a junco

Here's a riddle:  When is a junco not a junco?  Answer:  Why, when it's a yellow-rumped warbler, of course.   But damned if I wouldn't have sworn up and down that this was a junco when I was watching it.  It was feeding on the ground like a junco, and to the naked eye at about 30 feet, it looked exactly like a junco --dark above and light below.  And besides, there were other juncos around at the time.  But you know what they say about the camera -- it adds 30 pounds, and turns juncos into yellow-rumped warblers.

I later found out from the paper that this fall yellow-rumped warblers had been seen by watchers in enormous numbers -- flocks of over a thousand.  Strange, that.  I guess they can spare one for Somerville.

Sphyrapicus varius

If there was ever an animal that needed a publicist, it would be the yellow-bellied sapsucker, whose name is basically a string of insults.  That said, the name is apt in a descriptive sense -- though the females, of which this is one, aren't quite so yellow-bellied, and in Somerville at least, neither males nor females are doing much sap-sucking.  Here they're only coming or going, and as such, I've only ever seen them in March or October.

A similar thing can be said of the Eastern phoebe.  They do well around people generally, but I guess Somerville is just a bit too much for them.  We only catch the transients, and rarely at that.

More of the same

I think that's a pine warbler, looking a bit like Quasimodo here.  If it is a pine warbler, that's number 64 on my Somerville species list.

Here's one I'm a bit more certain about:  a black-throated blue warbler, sadly decapitated by my lens.  It was eating grapes.

I've started logging the birds I see on eBird, since Somerville is underrepresented there, not so surprisingly. Or at least I'm logging the kinds of birds I don't see every day -- these two, for example.