The Birds of Summer - Breeding Birds at Red Rock Lakes NWR

Male Cassin's finch

Female Cassin's finch

Short-eared owl

Immature Bald Eagle

Audubon's Yellow-Rumped Warbler

Horned Lark

Chipping Sparrow

Yellow-headed blackbird

Marsh Wren

Savannah sparrow

Cliff swallow

Pine siskin

Mourning Dove

I'm REALLY excited about a new app from Cornell that lets you put a photograph of a bird into the program, mark the bill tip, eye, and tail tip and (usually) get a 1-3 set of possibilities. So far it is only for 400 birds but will get good at more and more birds. It is called Merlin Photo ID Beta.

I had a bird come in and sing that was pretty far away and I got an image of a shape/pose  like a Bell's vireo but I saw a yellow throat.  I didn't recognize the song either. I was flummoxed and ended up asking for and ID on the Facebook group, The Great Backyard Bird Count.  Several of the group told me it was a house wren.  I stuck it in Merlin - I just go to the webpage so pictures and app are all done on my laptop - and this is the result:

Whoo Hoo!  Now I can't wait for them to get all those less common or hard-to-ID birds included. I also got an dark morph Swainson's hawk identified from a poorly lit and not very sharp picture of the bird at a distance.

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