ML622393974

Age

Not specified

Sex

Not specified

Observation details

White above eye on both sides of face. Photos. First GA record if accepted. On wire fence along Taff shorebird pond about 8 AM and never re-landed after flushing. Swallows had dispersed by 9 AM. *Notes added on computer immediately after arriving home: historical August records in eBird from Ontario, PA, MA, and central TX, but none from the southeast that I could find. Seen on wire at 34.099665, -84.908608. Swallows were lined up on wires, and I noticed this one with a paler face. Through binoculars, I could see it had the facial pattern of a Violet-green Swallow, so I immediately tried to position my car to get documentary photos. The bird was harshly backlit, so I crept forward at an angle I could get unobstructed photos in the best light possible without flushing the swallows. As I tried to creep forward into better light, all the birds on the wire flushed as killdeer on the pond margin noisily spooked, and I was unable to get any photos showing the rump area as the VGSW was about the furthest swallow from me and was already blocked from view by other flying swallows by the time it took off. I repositioned my vehicle into better lighting for photos anticipating the bird might return to the same area, but it never did. Other swallows did return about 20-25 at a time, flushing every time a car went by or a killdeer alarm went off, each time returning with a slightly different species composition (always mostly Barn Swallows), but I never relocated the VGSW or any other swallow with white above the eye. I took 13 total photos of the bird before it flushed and will upload them all as soon as I finish cropping, etc. *Additional notes AFTER EDITING and REVIEWING PHOTOS: photos seem to confirm narrower wings and shorter tail (shorter than wings) than adjacent TRES. In the field, color was very hard to see on the backlit swallow, and most of my short viewing time was spent looking through the camera to document. A couple of times through the camera I thought I saw the correct shade of green on the top of the head and violet towards the lower back, and this seems to also be confirmed by the photos. Original photos with metadata will be provided to GCRC. Location can be verified by details of fencepost in photo (and vegetation is standard GA pasture species). All photos were taken between 7:56 and 7:57 on my camera, which seems to currently be running 2-3 minutes slow (i.e. actual time of sighting, from first binocular views to flushing after the last photo was probably 7:58-8:00 AM). View and photos were looking towards the SSE with full sun rising relatively low in the sky in the SE.

Additional species

• Tree Swallow Tachycineta bicolor

Technical information

Model

NIKON D500

ISO

3200

Focal length

500 mm

Flash

Flash did not fire

f-stop

f/11.0

Shutter speed

1/800 sec

Dimensions

2000 pixels x 1500 pixels

Original file size

1.08 MB