Frustration

Another one of my character flaws is that if learning doesn’t come easily to me, I get pretty frustrated, and, well… sometimes a little snippy. (Sorry about that, Tom and J and Kyle and all the visitors at closing day of SWAT.)  Maybe I should have named this blog Frustrations of a Beginning Birder?

For example, I was trying to figure out if our very last bird of the SWAT 2008 season (Magnolia Warbler) was a hatch year bird, or maybe an adult female…  I’m blowing on her belly to move the feathers around and I see new growth there – pin feathers that haven’t fully developed yet.  So I say to J, “I see pin feathers.  Does that mean it is a new bird?  A hatch year bird?”

He replies, “How do you know it isn’t a female whose brood patch is growing back in?”

I say, “I DON’T know!  That’s why I’m asking you!!!”  I think J picked up on my frustration.  He takes the bird, examines it, says, “It’s a hatch year,” and hands it back.  It doesn’t help that he’s only 15, but has 8 years of banding experience…  Oh, poor me; I feel so inadequate…  I still don’t know what he saw that made him so sure so quickly…

Identification often makes my blood boil, too.  Consider this bird:

We caught it at the CLDC site when we had a little time to spare, so Tom gave the newbies a chance to try to identify it.  I tried and tried using the field marks, comparing them to the pictures in the Sibley’s field guide.  Nothing looked like a match.  Tom suggested that I use his Warbler’s field guide.  I refused, frustration rising…  It’s a thick book and I have no experience with it… The bird would die in my hand of starvation before I even figured out how to use the book…  I was beginning to shut down.  I didn’t care what this bird was.

I think Tom finally revealed that it was a Black-throated Green Warbler.  I may have gone a little ballistic after that.  “What???  It has no black throat.  It has no green.”  Am I ever going to learn this stuff, I wonder.  Maybe you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.  I turned to Black-throated Green in the field guide.  There is no way I would ever have gotten to a positive identification using field marks.  Not at this stage in my learning.  The warblers still all look the same to me…  This is going to take time.  I feel like I’ve enrolled in Calculus without ever having mastered Algebra.

So that was July 26.  Now, return to August 1 when we catch this bird:

Tom asks, “What’s this bird, Jen?  You’ve seen it before!”  Apparently, I learned nothing on July 26, because I still do not recognize this as a Black-throated Green Warbler.  “Use the tail chart,” he suggests.  Tom had introduced this at earlier banding sessions, but there is so much to learn that not everything sticks after the first exposure.

This is one row from a chart that shows the markings on the outermost rectrice (or tail feather) of several warbler species.  After much deliberation (but milder frustration than July 26 at CLDC), I decide that my tail feather looks most like… guess what… Black-throated Green!

  

OK, I guess those feathers on top of the head do look sort of greenish in this light.  I wouldn’t agree with Sibley’s field guide that they are “bright green.”  And there’s still no black throat.

I searched through my Flickr friends photos to see if anyone had a Black-throated Green Warbler and found this male in breeding plumage by “Martytdx“.  Here, the throat is black, but the head green?  I dunno:

So, there you have it… Black-throated Green Warbler.  Don’t know when I’ll see one again.  I wonder if I’ll know it when I see it next time?

Learn more:

• http://www.birds.cornell.edu/AllAboutBirds/BirdGuide/Black-throated_Green_Warbler_dtl.html