ugogran, close guess on the tanager. The bill of a tanager is more conical and a bit shorter whereas the warbler has a thinner all-purpose. You can also see the start of the chestnut colored streaking on the breast that the tanager doesn't have. The eye-ring is still present so it's either young, or female. Females don't have the breast streaking so it's a first year male. Another easy way to tell the difference in a lot of birds, and something often overlooked, is the color of the legs. My father is an ornithologist and he taught me as a little kid to always look at the legs! Tanagers have grey legs whereas the yellow warbler has pink to light olive legs. Either one is quite welcome in our little corner of the planet :) Grackles...ugh. Right now we have a boatload of immatures hanging around all the water features. They love to pull on any nearby plant and it drive me bonkers. But hey, at least they aren't starlings.

The leaves are now mostly opened, so when I'm in the woods, it's almost too dark for my Canon EOS 40D. Guess I'll have to either upgrade cameras or start taking photos on the edges of the woods. Here's a Scarlet Tanager I took on Friday in the woods above our pond. I had to heavily edit/lighten the photo From 5-12-09 birds but the woods had more light the week before, a different tanager, same logging road, less editing From May 2009 To see the rest of the photos in the albums, doubleclick on each photos, click "Slideshow." You can edit the slideshow to include labels or not, or choose number of seconds per photo, etc.

Thanks! Still behind; I have another web album of photos I've not yet posted. We camped in the yard last night as usual in our screen tent, and apparently the jaguar is back..the dogs suddenly went crazy and we heard the strangest, loudest noises. I went online and found some of what we heard on this link-scroll down to audio clip http://animals.nationalgeographic.com/animals/mammals/jaguar.html Besides the wails, grunts, rumbles, it also kept making explosive snorts..like an alarmed deer, except MUCH louder, more explosive, lower down, and dragged on and on until my bones vibrated. It seemed the sound wrapped around the tent, and I didn't know where to point the huge spotlight we keep next to us. DuBois plant to take a tape recorder with us this time, in case it returns. I also plan to download jaguar sounds and play them next to my web cams on the hill to see if we can lure it in for a photo. We've not seen its tracks since this march..guess it has a huge territory. Our neighbor was approached by a half grown black jaguar while hunting on our property in the fall of 2006 so it should nearly mature now. Just this spring, another neighbor a few miles away spotted a black jaguar on his farm, so it's still alive. Photo of suspected jaguar track, click on "full screen" http://picasaweb.google.com/rachelbro3/BigFootTracksScat#5317982295991557506

Looks very much like a Scarlet Tanager.