ML53275261

Age

Not specified

Sex

Not specified

Media notes

This basic-plumaged American Golden-Plover was found the previous afternoon by Tony Metcalf and photographed here in flight by Curtis A. Marantz on 2 April 2017 at the San Jacinto Wildlife Area, Riverside County, California.

Observation details

This was a medium-sized plover that appeared to be 20-30% larger than nearby Killdeer and not entirely different in shape. The bill tapered from a base of medium-depth to a blunt tip along a straight culmen, and it would have extended backward on the face to a point near the rear edge of the auriculars. The forehead was steep and the crown was gently rounded, with the junctions of the crown with the forehead and nape more strongly rounded, and seemingly more so at the forehead than the nape. The neck was short and stocky, and the body was plump, full-chested, and with a posture that was closer to horizontal than diagonal. The tail was about one-third the length of the body without the head and neck, but I had a hard time discerning the shape. The wings were conspicuously long with tapered wingtips that extended beyond the tail at least half the bill length. I again failed to see the number of primaries extending beyond the longest tertial, yet I noted that the primary projection was only slightly shorter than the length of the exposed tertials. The legs appeared stouter than those of a sandpiper of similar size, but they were unremarkable in length. This bird’s plumage patterns and coloration were not strikingly different from those of a winter Black-bellied Plover. In this respect, this bird was much duller in coloration than I associate with Pacific Golden-Plover, and more grayish than my impression from the previous afternoon. The forehead was whitish to light gray and finely streaked darker. A dark cap extended across the crown from its junction with the forehead to the nape and down to the upper edges of the superciliary region. The crown was blackish with fine, buff edges to the feathers. Delineating the cap was a white supercilium that was more sharply demarcated along its upper edge than the lower, and boldest from just above the eye back along the upper edge of the auriculars to about their rear terminus. The supraloral and loral regions were generally similar in color to the forehead, yet I noticed a darker crescent just before the eye. The face was about this same shade of light gray and finely streaked darker, at least below the eyes. A rounded spot of dusky coloration in the rear part of the auriculars was quite conspicuous and surrounded by light gray on the front part of the auriculars, the sides of the neck, and the throat. The back of the neck was medium-gray with darker clouding. The throat was whitish, the breast and sides were cream-colored with grayish clouding, and the belly, flanks, and undertail coverts were whitish and seemingly unmarked. The pattern on the upperparts and wings was a complex one that appeared to combine different generations of feathers. The mantle appeared rather dark but with paler speckling that I thought represented markings along the feather edges. The scapulars averaged even darker and with some feathers seemingly having small, golden notches around their edges that contributed to the speckled pattern. I thought the wing coverts were more grayish than the scapulars, yet they too had a mottled pattern that I found difficult to characterize. Contrasting with the coverts, the tertials had blackish centers and deep notches of buff along both the inner and outer webs that imparted a boldly barred pattern and a little more color than the rest of the wing. I again thought the exposed primary tips were black with at most minimal marking, which confounded my ability to discern the individual feathers in the wingtip. When seen from the side, the outer rectrices appeared to combine back-and-white barring, with the white seemingly dominating, but I never clearly saw the spread tail in the field (though it is probably shown in some of my photos). The bill was black, the eyes were dark enough as to appear black in the field, and the legs and whatever I saw of the feet were slate-gray.

Technical information

Model

Canon EOS 7D Mark II

Lens

EF100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS II USM

ISO

160

Focal length

400 mm

Flash

Flash did not fire, auto

f-stop

f/8.0

Shutter speed

1/640 sec

Dimensions

1451 pixels x 956 pixels

Original file size

223.63 KB