Epaulets

On a warm day in May I headed out to the Skokie Lagoons near Northfield, Illinois to see what birds were in the area. I found a lot of barn swallows gathering mud for their nests. Caught a few field sparrows singing away looking for a mate.

Perched on the reeds was a male red-winged blackbird who was singing relentlessly in an attempt to claim the entire shoreline and the adjacent terrain for its exclusive territory. The red-winged blackbird is a very common bird in that habitat. He was quite active and the upper photo shows him in full display. After a while another red-winged blackbird showed up to stake a claim as well. He is in the lower photo. You might notice that his epaulets are colored differently than his rival's. The wing markings on the bird in the upper photo are bright red with a yellow stripe at the bottom of the epaulet. The wing markings on the bird in the lower photo is a yellow almost yellow orange solid color. I had never observed a red-winged blackbird with yellow-orange epaulets, so I was curious if this might be a different species or simply an aberration.

When I got home and downloaded the pictures to my computer, I immediately emailed the photos to a friend of mine in Southern Illinos who is a Park Ranger for the Army Corps of Engineers at Rend Lake, Illinois. He was not sure what to make of the coloration. So, since last May I have been wondering about the identification of the red-wing with the odd colored markings.

Two weeks ago while wandering through the internet I typed in a search and came up with the answer ... the yellow epaulets occur in some immature male red-wings. One more mystery solved!

Something to Crow About

As I said, most of my photos have a story. While on a vacation in October 2007 which took us down the Blue Ridge Parkway, we decided to take a ride on the Great Smoky Mountain Railway from Bryson City to Dillsboro, NC. On the return leg of the ride, we rode in the open air car - much better than the coach car for photographs. I was on one side of the car and Patti was on the other side. It felt like most of my photos were going to end up in the discard bin because the ride was rather rocky and I could not seem to steady the Nikon with any reliability. I heard Patti say, "Come over to this side, there are a bunch of chickens out here." I staggered to the other side of the open air car and spied the aforementioned chickens. There on top of the shed was a rooster. I brought up the camera and basically just fired the shutter. As the train trip drew to an end I had pretty much forgotten about that specific shot.

That night I was going through the routine of downloading all of our photos (hundreds and hundreds of them each night). I came across the rooster photo. Not only was it in focus with decent composition, it caught him in the middle of a crow! This was one of my best captures from the 9 day trip!