ML618898846

Age

Not specified

Sex

Not specified

Observation details

****MEGA Writing this after doing a big day for 22+ hours already, so not too sane anymore. While birding at Panama, and struggling to add more new birds to our ongoing Global Big Day, me and Sean decided to walk all the way down to the SE corner where a small flock of peeps and dowitchers had settled. Upon arrival I put down the scope and immediately yelled to Sean: 'TEMMINCKS!", which I quickly took back as I thought fatigue was setting in and was worried I was seeing things that weren't entirely there. The general posture of the bird was very similar to LESA, but with a far more retarded plumage compared to the already very advanced LESA it was foraging with. The pattern on the mantle and scaps seemed indicative of Temminck's rather than LESA right away, missing the huge black centers of LESA but rather having more limited amounts of black, large amounts of pale fringing and especially a narrow needle-like pattern running along the shaft. A faint eye-ring was visible, legs yellow just as in LESA, but also: tail clearly reaching past the wing tips. I called Nathan Hentze as he is my consultant in these situations, while me and Sean still were feeling very uncertain about this bird. I texted Nathan I wasn't feeling certain about it at all, even before he arrived, but he managed to get there within 10 minutes. We observed the bird for close to 40 minutes, constantly thinking we might have a very unusual LESA, but also not at all finding any argument how to exclude Temmincks. At some point, our opinion started to shift towards Temminck's instead, and at this point also the first confirmations from my Belgian friends started coming in (thanks guys!). It was when this realization happened that I immediately decided to text it out on our local WhatsApp, which resulted in at least one observer (Thompson H.) making the twitch right before dark. The bird was visible for just a minute for him, before it departed with LESA to farther into the wetland. It was constantly foraging on the mud and short vegetation at 48°28'20.3"N 123°23'57.0"W, before flying to the central dyke. Before it departed, it looked very alert, and given my experience with the call in Europe and Asia, I started recording, hoping that the bird would display its dry and bat-like thrill, definitely different from LESA. It did this, and the audio fragment is attached as well. During the whole observation, no photos were obtained given the low light conditions, but I managed to film the bird from start to finish, of which the best 2 videos are included here (uploaded to YouTube). PLEASE WATCH VIDEOS AS THE POOR PHOTOS ARE MERE SCREENSHOTS OF THESE WITH HIGHLY REDUCED QUALITY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cThWKgVvuik https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-nAIEnh4_M

Technical information

Model

Canon EOS 7D Mark II

Lens

EF400mm f/5.6L USM

ISO

12800

Focal length

400 mm

Flash

Flash did not fire

f-stop

f/5.6

Shutter speed

1/500 sec

Dimensions

2422 pixels x 1615 pixels

Original file size

1.2 MB