August 2024 Photo Quiz

Tony Leukering
Dodge City, KS
greatgrayowl@aol.com

It is a pleasant February day in the Great Plains, and an odd song catches our attention, so we cast around looking for the singer.

Ouch. Not the best views, but at least we know this month’s quiz bird is a passerine with that foot structure. First off, I want to harp on a feature on which I’ve frequently played that large, stringed instrument in bird-ID photo quizzes: Soft-parts coloration. Note the quiz bird’s dark pink legs. Yes, they might look brown to some, but that would be a rarer leg color in birds than is pink, and pink ain’t at all common in its own right! In non-passerines, pink legs generally means gulls, but one can also throw in Bufflehead and stilts among not too many other options. In passerines, it nearly unfailingly indicates a species that spends most of its time on or near the ground. I have no clue why that would be, but it’s true. The pink legs of Sprague’s Pipit can help distinguish the bird from American Pipit and from juvenile Horned Lark. Leg color is a very useful field-ID character.

Now that I’ve harped, it’s time to let you get on with identifying the beastie.

Photos and answers are supplied by Tony Leukering, a field ornithologist based in southeast Dodge City, KS, with strong interests in bird migration, distribution, and identification. He has worked for five different bird observatories from coast to coast and considers himself particularly adept at taking quiz photos (that is, bad pictures!). Leukering is a member of the Colorado Bird Records Committee and had been a reviewer for eBird since its inception. He is also interested in most everything else that flies, particularly moths and odonates.