Guatemala: Orchard Oriole SY-F

It was hard to know where to look in the yard at Los Andes. Red-billed Pigeons competed for our attention with Social Flycatchers, Yellow-winged Tanagers with Red-legged Honeycreepers. And then there were the boreal migrants: Baltimore Orioles, Rose-breasted Grosbeaks, Indigo Buntings–birds I don’t see often in the winter.

This Orchard Oriole perched up for a good long time, probably drying off after a bath, and I took the opportunity to hone my digiscoping skills. (Love my camera, love my scope, but the twain don’t meet all that well in my hands.) Lousy as the photos are, they’re great material for a quiz.

This is an easy bird to sex: by late February, all males of whatever age should be showing black on the throat. This uniformly yellow-headed bird is a female.

The shape and state of the tail feathers allow us to age her. Orchard Orioles retain their juvenile tail through the first year of life; those juvenile rectrices are slender, pointed, and of poor quality, all features readily visible in this spread-tail shot. Some of the apparent feather shape may be due to dampness (she’d been bathing), but especially if we look at the outer pair of rectrices, we can see plenty of missing barbs; an adult’s tail feathers should be stronger and fresher, blunter-tipped and perhaps darker (though the backlighting here is severe).

So this is a female Orchard Oriole of the class of ‘08, a bird in her first plumage cycle, an “SY-F” in calendar-year terminology. I wonder where she was hatched and when she will get back to the breeding grounds from Guatemala.