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Can I get the I.D. for a bird or two I photographed yesterday?

14 years ago

I have always loved this forum and due to work and family responsibilities, I never had enough time to do much more than just lurk. I thought I remembered a bird I.D. forum as part of this one. Maybe I'm remembering wrong.

Anyway, now that I'm retired and I have more time I've been doing a little bird watching and photography. Yesterday I went in search of egrets and altho they were too far from the road to get a good shot, along with them was a very tall dark bird, it appeared to be taller than the egrets. It was darker than a Great Blue Heron...in fact, it was almost the color of an ostrich. LOL I live in Western Illinois and the last time I looked most ostrichs around here were penned up on farms or in the zoo! It was with the egrets and was too far away to get a decent photo of and not a bit of it's head/face.

I also got a couple shots of a bird I thought was some sort of swallow the way it was dipping and swooping as it flew by me. I managed to get shots, altho not great, that could possibly be I.D.'d.

When I came here, I didn't see the I.D. forum anymore and I couldn't find any other birding forums on GW so I wondered if I posted the pix here if someone could help me?

If this is the wrong place to post them, I'm sorry. Just chalk it up to my ignorance.

Thanks in advance for any help. :)

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Comments (5)

dzyg
14 years ago
You sure can post the pics, lots of people get bird id's from this forum. Post away....
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ginni77
Original Author
14 years ago
Thank you so much!! I will do that. First I better tell you the area we're in. We live in Illinois between the Mississippi River and Rock River in the Quad Cities (Ever hear of the Rock Island lines or John Deere of Moline, Illinois?...well, we're from the Rock Island/Moline area.)

Here is the wading bird that's so dark looking. I'm so sorry these photos are so small and hard to see...there was a huge marshy area between me and the birds. I'm in the market for a better zoom lens, but WOW have you seen the price of them??

This is the swooper...some sort of plover or sandpiper maybe? At first I thought it was a swallow of some sort...then when I saw the photo I thought maybe a killdeer, but I don't think so. Sorry these are poor photos too...it flashed by me so quickly, I just snapped away as a spur of the moment thing!

Would someone please confirm that this is a female redwing blackbird?

This one was from a different day in the woods. There were lots of orioles, bluebirds, red-bellied woodpeckers, and a myriad of other birds in this area. I was wondering if it could be a female oriole...the tail doesn't seem long enough. Again, sorry for the quality, it was a long way away from me. I did unspeakable things to this photo to get it to even show any markings but the color is just not there.

Thanks so much for any help!

Ginni (the bird challenged)
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Connie Kru
14 years ago
Could it have been a Sand Hill Crane??
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dzyg
14 years ago
Yeah, I was wondering too about Sandhill cranes for your big bird in the first photos. I would say some kind of Plover for the swooping bird, I would have to look up to be sure but it isn't a swallow. Yes that is a female Redwing and I think your last bird is a white breasted nuthatch, hard to tell for sure though with the contrasting photo. Hope that helped some.

Donna
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ginni77
Original Author
14 years ago
Good call...it very well could be a sandhill crane. My brother in law works very close to this area and he took a photo of one on his phone not too long ago just a couple of blocks from where this marshy area is. I'd forgotten all about that until you mentioned it. His showed the red on it's head and his wasn't quite this dark...but it just might be. I'll get back there in a day or two and see if I can find it again. It could just look dark in my photo because it's so far away.

The bird in the last photo could have been a nuthatch but it didn't really move like a nuthatch. That's a good guess, considering the lousy quality of the photo. I wasn't sure if it was some sort of warbler or what it was!
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