Que sais-je?
ByIf it’s true that bad photos make the best quizzes, this one may never be beat!
Well, yes, of course, there was a trick. The bird is a male House Finch, readily identified by the distribution of red on the head, the diffuse brown streaking beneath, the strongly curved upper mandible, and so on.
But how old is it?
All juvenile House Finches, from whatever population and of whichever sex, are brown, so we know that this bird is not a juvenile. But is it an adult, or is it entering the first winter of its life?
Answer: I don’t really know. The aging characters for House Finches are subtle and variable, and this photo, taken here in Tucson, does not show any of the wing characters that might (or might not) be useful. The degree of saturation of the red, quite pale here, is not reliable to separate young males from adults; remember that the brightest male House Finches are the most worn, and that fresh plumage in all ages shows this veiled appearance, created by pale edges and tips that eventually wear away, making the feathers more solidly red.
But I think there may be a clue. We can see the tail quite well, and the outer rectrices seem to my eye to be clearly squared off at the tip. The inner ones, however, appear to be quite pointed. Looking closely, we can see that the outers are shorter than the inners, thus still growing, and the contrast in their shape leads me to suspect that we are seeing a male House Finch molting from juvenile into first-basic plumage.
