eBirdseed.com Wild Bird Feeding Blog

Well, this was supposed to be a bit of fun fluff. I was going to use some crazy, brute-force method for holding down an ear of corn (I ended up using two slabs of cement), and in doing so get a nice shot of a squirrel or better. As it turned out, I got lucky and snagged a very primo pic of the chipmunk below.



That's the way it was supposed to work. But it didn't... The NovaBird camera caught an image I wasn't expecting, and cannot explain...



Though the bird was clearly beyond the focal length of the camera, the photograph still holds some validity... A closer look is revealing...

• At first I thought that this was just light shining off the beak... But the picture was taken at 13:45:31 on 07 14 2007... The sun was pretty much overhead and there wouldn't have been a white color on the underside of the chin. Also, if you look carefully in the background, you can see bright patches where the sun's rays pierced through the overhanging tree, and struck the ground. I don't think this is light playing games with the lens.
• It might be an issue with the NovaBird itself, though I've taken thousands of pictures with it and never seen this type of symmetrical anomaly.
• Comparing the bird with others in roughly the same location in the same shoot, I'd say that it's approximately the size of a large grackle or a small crow.
• The color of the iris appears to be brown. That would strongly suggest a type of crow.

So what is this bird?

• Maybe it is just a crow subject to a photographic "cronk".
• It might be a juvenile crow, (though I can't find any documentation that young crows look like that).
• On the fringe of possibilities, this is some sort of Rook, a Eurasian bird that ended up here. (Don't laugh... A Eurasian Kestrel showed up on Cape Cod in Chatham in 2002.)
• In any event, there it is. If anyone can shed light on the situation, I'd sure like to know!
  
  Puzzled by the feeders,
  
  CapeCodAlan