ML168354681

Age

Not specified

Sex

Not specified

Observation details

**very rare; we first noticed this bird after it caught an insect and landed in a treetop near the base of the Life of the Marsh Nature Trail; after a short interval, it flew off and Matt promptly found it again from the Bayside Point parking area (<1/2 mile away). The bird hawked many large flying arthropods from the air and ate them, settling in to a few snags near the northeastern corner of the Bayside Point parking area. Once it began to move around more, I followed the bird back out to the entrance road to an area roughly halfway between the Bayside Point parking area and the Life of the Marsh Nature Trail. This was a heavily worn Tyrannus kingbird with a bright yellow belly and dull brownish wings and tail with a deep notch in the center of the tip of the tail. It had a large black bill that seemed fairly wide at the base. The smoothly pointed, non-emarginated shape of the primary tips suggests that this is an immature bird (HY/ SY). The bird was silent for the majority of our observations. Playback experiments were unsuccessful in prompting the bird to call. However, I heard it call unprompted 5x (widely spaced) starting after 11:00 AM. Each time the bird called (shortly after landing on a perch), it gave a single phrase - a familiar high, metallic trill. I ended up speaking over the only audio recording I managed of one of the bird's intermittent calls (while giving directions to another birder - bad timing!), but you can hear (and see in the spectrogram around 5 kHz) the beginning of the rapid, high trill starting just before my voice on the accompanying recording.

Technical information

Model

Canon EOS 7D Mark II

Lens

EF400mm f/5.6L USM

ISO

1600

Focal length

400 mm

Flash

Flash did not fire, auto

f-stop

f/6.3

Shutter speed

1/4000 sec

Dimensions

1500 pixels x 999 pixels

Original file size

435.35 KB