This week's collection of Sightings

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Stephen’s first-spring (hatched last summer) summer tanager is an example of a bird that migrated north from the tropics in late April and instead of stopping at his normal nesting region in the mid-Eastern U.S., he overshot and landed in southern New Brunswick, ending up at Stephen’s feeder in Quispamsis. The summer tanager is common from New Jersey, south to Florida and west to east Texas, but is a rare visitor to the Maritimes. Males become entirely red by their second fall; at the moment this bird is gradually molting from greenish immature plumage to red adulthood. I understand dozens of birders from across N.B. have visited Quispamsis to see this bird in recent days. Jim

Heather’s green-winged teal is a female bird, much more plain than a male, which would have a distinctive chestnut and green head and a grey body with a prominent vertical white line at each side of the chest near the bend of the folded wing. But we do see the tiny green patch in her folded wing that gives this duck its name. The green-winged teal is the smallest “dabbling” duck that we have. Dabblers tip up and reach down to get potential food at the bottom of freshwater bodies, so green-winged teal are usually found in places where the water is shallow enough for them to reach to the bottom. Jim

No, Cathy’s female blackbird isn’t a yellow-headed blackbird from the west. It’s a female red-winged blackbird that has not yet gone to her nesting area in some marsh or bog nearby. As we can see, female red-wings are dark brown with darker lengthwise streaking and a buffy-pink wash on the throat area. An adult female yellow-headed blackbird from the prairies would be a trifle larger with a dark brown body lacking the dark streaking and with a clear dull yellow throat. Although rare in the east, N.B. usually gets one or two yellow-heads each year, most often in the fall and sometimes they are bright adult males. Jim

Heather’s killdeer is a member of the plover family. Plovers are a sub-group of shorebirds, and this species gets its name from its distinctive shrill call that clearly sounds like “kill-deer!” of “kill-dee!” These birds don’t have anything to do with deer of course, but the name aptly describes their cry. Killdeer prefer open areas such as short-grass fields and gravelly shores and they have a double black breast band that separates them from all other similar plovers that migrate through the province, principally during the fall. Jim

A female brown-headed cowbird is about as plain a bird as we have, and is distinctive because of it. Notice that the bird is ash-grey overall and has a dark beak that, if seen well is a medium thickness, not slim like a warbler nor as thick as a finch. This is a member of the blackbird family and males are coal black with a chocolate-brown head that makes them easy to identify. Cowbirds are the only birds we have in North America that are parasitic, meaning that females don’t construct a nest or incubate a clutch of eggs, they surreptitiously lay one or two of their eggs in the nests of other bird species, usually ones smaller than themselves. The young cowbird hatches quite quickly and soon outgrows the nestlings of the host, normally resulting in the baby cowbird being the only nestling to fledge. Brown-headed cowbirds were formerly abundant in the Maritimes, but their numbers have declined in recent decades. Jim

Barbara’s song sparrow might be courting its reflected image, but it’s much more likely this is a case of seeing a presumed rival and trying to either drive it away or to out-perform the competitor by singing a territorial song. Normally, in my experience, songbirds bond over time by physically and vocally connecting and interacting with each other in several ways before becoming a nesting pair. I think it’s doubtful that a mute reflected image in the window glass would be looked upon as a potential mate, but more likely as an intruder within the existing pair’s nesting territory. Usually the resident bird will go to great lengths to drive the perceived intruder away, but perhaps this male feels he can out-sing this other fellow, rather than get overly physical. Who knows? Jim

Sylvia is right, it’s a male purple finch. The male of this species is a nice rosy-red bird with a thick beak for cracking seeds, while the female is brown and streaked, more like a sparrow. Both have the thick bill and both also have a notched tail, which is one of the bird’s field marks. Purple finches are birds of coniferous forests, but will nest close to homes during the spring and summer, placing their nest quite high in a conifer and laying four or five pale bluish eggs with black spots in a ring around the larger end. As far as I know they nest only once each spring at our latitude. Jim

Although this woodpecker looks much like a downy, this bird is not that species. Actually, it’s a female yellow-bellied sapsucker. Sapsuckers are a migratory species, with both sexes moving southward in the fall to at least the southern U.S. and sometimes even farther, and returning in early to mid-April each spring. If we look at this bird we see that it has a back that’s extensively checkered black and white and a red crown that’s more extensive than a downy or a hairy woodpecker, either of which would have the red restricted to just a spot on the rear of the head (the nape). As I mentioned, this bird is a female as her throat is white; male sapsuckers have an extensive red throat. This woodpecker is the one that makes rows of tiny holes in the bark of deciduous trees in springtime to cause the tree to exude sap from the holes. The woodpecker then visits repeatedly, both to lick up the sweet sap and to feed on any insects attracted to the flow. It appears the bird is doing just that in Ken and Judy’s photo. Jim

JIM WILSON  is the chair of the New Brunswick Bird Records Committee. Send your Sightings of live animals and birds by email to tjsightings@postmedia.com. Please indicate your full name and the community where you live. Due to space constraints, we are not able to publish all the submissions we receive.