[obol] Birding Dowitchers

Charles R. Gates cgates at empnet.com
Sun Sep 24 19:22:19 PDT 2006


I'm interested to hear comments about the article on Dowitcher ID in the
newest edition of Birding Magazine.  The authors offer up several
morphological cues that can be used to ID Dowitchers without hearing them.
I'm just wondering if anyone has used the methods mentioned and what results
were achieved.  I need to re-read and study before being fully confident of
the content of the article (I'm a little slow) but I used forehead shape on
a pair of Dowitchers yesterday just to convince myself that they were
Long-billed.  I thought one of the most important things I got out of the
article is that photos are not necessarily the end all for bird ID.  I
thought the photos in the article sometimes contradicted the text.  Anyone
else see this?

Chuck Gates
Powell Butte




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