Admittedly, when things get tight I go to my ace in the hole. Lucky for me, I was able to finish processing all the shots from our first day at the Henderson Bird Viewing Preserve. If you recall, on our trip to Nevada last year we stopped in to that gem of a preserve. Per previous posts, this area already provided two blog posts for brand new birds to my collection – specifically, the Green-Winged Teal (link here) and the Greater Roadrunner (link here). Here’s a little secret. Those were not the only two new birds this shoot produced! I was able to add another new check in the bird list with today’s blog entry.
Anyone want to take a guess on what this might be? Really take a guess – a little validation would help me at this point. This little bird took me some extra time to eventually come to a consensus on what it was… or actually what I think it is. To accomplish this I employed my brand new bird reference guide I picked up while out in Yellowstone. While perusing the various gift shops in the park, The Stokes Field Guide To The Birds of North America caught my eye. It isn’t often a book on birds shows up I do not already have, much less ever seen. The key aspect of this particular reference was the ABUNDANCE of pictures. None of the books on my shelves come close to having the quantity of actual photographs contained in this book – in particular the fact it has shots of the female, the male, the juvenile and even seasonal and regional differences. Truly awesome and it was instantly “mine” – didn’t hurt we got a discount being Yellowstone Association members but truth be told I would have gladly paid full price (shhhh don’t tell anyone). After about 40 minutes of thumbing through the book I decided to go with … drum roll .. a Verdin. The only concern was the region but a closer look (need a brush up on my state shapes) shows that it does venture into Southern Nevada. A friend at work (thanks John!) helped me verify the region today so thinking that concern is past me. As with any bird post at Lifeintrigued – you are more than welcome to debate any identification. So for now were going with a Verdin. This bird is especially cool since it doesn’t come anywhere near where I live making the trip that much more fruitful.
According to Stokes, this bird prefers desert scrub along washes and streams. The desert part was dead on and it was alongside one of their ponds which kinda fits the water reference. That is about the sum total of info I got out of the book. Again, that was purchased to help identify the bird, I have our friends over at Wikipedia and an abundance of info on the web to fill the data gap – finding out what the hell it is the real battle. Another site did mention they like thorny scrub – based on the shot above and the one below, this one was right at home.
Hit the jump to read more about this cool looking bird.
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