Your Questions

Send all your birding questions to birdwatching@bauermedia.co.uk and our experts will give you the answers

Our expert panel answer your birding questions

Unremarkable bird?

QThis unremarkable looking bird was photographed in Monterey, California, in September. Please help identify it. Iain Watson

AUnremarkable it may look, but this dark-looking passerine is a member of a family which we don’t have (except in exceptionally rare circumstances) in the UK. It is an icterid, the same family which includes the New World blackbirds, grackles, cowbirds and meadowlarks and so on. Many are glossy blue-black in the males with duller, brown-black females. There aren’t a huge number of these species in Monterey, which helps narrow the identification down to a dark-eyed female Brewer’s Blackbird.

This bird stood out

QPlease could you identify this bird for me. It was taken on 20 October alongside the River Hamble in Hampshire, it stood out because in the late afternoon sunshine it looked almost white against the tree foliage. Is it just a very light female Blackbird or is it more exotic eg a Red throated Thrush/ Naumann’s Thrush. If it does turn out to be a Blackbird, then it will have been the lightest one I’ve ever seen.

Maurice Oliver

AEvery so often we are sent photographs of unusuallooking Blackbirds. But few have ever been as pale as your bird. That said, we can see no reason why your very pale and ginger-breasted bird is not a Blackbird. Like the Ring Ouzels elsewhere on this Q&A page, field guides do not have space to include the full range of available plumage variations.

Is this a teal?

QHere are what I think to be a Blue-winged Teal for the ‘dabbling ducks’ photographs you suggested readers to send in. Please tell me if I have identified this duck incorrectly?

Octavia

AThank you very much for your photographs, Octavia. However, we believe your bird is a Mallard. Furthermore, we think it is a drake in the strange summer plumage known as ‘eclipse’, when, owing to impaired flight during wing moult, the striking drakes moult their body feathers to resemble more closely the cryptic-patterned females. Blue-winged Teals do not have yellow bills, but perhaps you were influenced by seeing the blue/ purple panel in the wing called the ‘speculum’ (although the ‘blue’ in Blue-winged Teal is in the forewing).