A Lousy Photo with a Point

Grotesquely dreadful, isn’t it? Taken through a smudgy window, then cropped and cropped and cropped again, then “sharpened” to make the bird something like visible. But this Northern Cardinal (didn’t really stump anybody, did it?) has a message for all of us.

Birding is, I believe, ultimately about identification, and I’ve written about that a number of times in a number of places–sometimes convincingly, sometimes perhaps not. But too many birders confuse “identification” with “species identification.” In fact, there’s a lot more you can tell about a bird by looking hard at it; in this case, you can tell where this bird was hatched within the huge (and expanding range) of its species.

Birders from the south and east and midwest are often surprised to learn that we have Northern Cardinals here in southwestern North America. And they’re even more surprised when they see one: our birds here in Arizona and Sonora are strikingly different from, and strikingly more beautiful than, the good old Virginia Cardinal so familiar from Christmas cards and children’s books.

Take a look at this one, photographed today in our magical hackberry thicket here in Tucson. He’s much redder, without the green cast to the wing typical of eastern birds; his crest is longer, thicker, and brighter, and his tail (you’ll have to trust me on this one) was longer and redder, too. Most of all, note the face pattern. Where on eastern birds the orange bill is surrounded by a neatly edged square of black feathering, on our local birds (named, fittingly enough, superbus) the face patch is limited to the area beneath and beside the bill, with the forehead red nearly all the way down to the base of the upper mandible.

So what? Well, I suppose that knowledge of any kind is better than ignorance; but more than that, knowing about regional variation–variation of all kinds–lets us evaluate our sightings much more carefully, much more shrewdly. Say that a Northern Cardinal shows up in Idaho some day: wouldn’t it be important to know whether it was an eastern invader or a pioneer from the south? Or take, as a very topical example, a White-collared Seedeater in Arizona: a warm-colored bird from Mexico’s west coast is more likely to be a genuine vagrant than a black-and-white one from farther south or east, which would be more rightly suspected of coming north in a cage.

Big Sibley, NatGeo, and Ted Floyd’s Smithsonian Guide include lots of information about geographic variation in North American birds. For the curious birder and the ambitious, though, nothing can beat Pyle’s Identification Guide, occasional browsing of which turns up all sorts of little tricks you can use to make your own birding more precise, more sophisticated, and a whole lot more fun.