Last weekend I visited the Red Butte Gardens. It’s only 3.5 miles from the house and has a variety of flowers. The views are not terribly lush, but that’s to be expected since the gardens are in the driest part of town.
The gardens, however, are full of birds and bunnies! Very hungry looking bunnies.
I got some great shots of a Black-Headed Grosbeak. There are many types of grosbeaks. Birdchick has a beautiful picture of a Rose-Breasted Grosbeak. Utah is supposed to have them but so far I’ve only seen Black-Headed Grosbeaks.
The first time I ever saw a grosbeak was at my feeders. He was terribly shy and so I could only get pictures through the glass. Grosbeaks prefer forests, so they were a lot more comfortable with me in their space. His breast is puffy in this picture because he was singing.
Black-Headed Grosbeaks are sometimes confused with Spotted Towhees. In performing an identification, make sure you look at the eyes. Spotted Towhees have red eyes.
Black-Headed Grosbeaks have a lovely song. I’m embarrassed to write that I thought I was listening to a House Finch singing until a saw the bird. I’ve been listening to the Stokes bird identification tracks, but they’re not sinking in yet. I can identify almost any track from the 1990′s based on four bars of music, but not these bird tracks. All that talent wasted on crappy alternative music.
Grosbeak refers to the large beak of a group of seed-eating passerines, i.e. songbirds. You can really see in the above picture that their beaks look disproportionately large compared to other songbirds. See, for example, a House Sparrow.
Now compare the female Black-Headed Grosbeak to the House Sparrow. If it weren’t for that beak, you could easily confuse the grosbeak for a sparrow, right?
I mean, checkout her crown.
It’s pretty similar to a white-crowned sparrow.
So watch the beak!
I love the Spotted Towhee; gorgeous! Kind of crazy pumpkiny eyes though.
It’s so difficult to tell some birds apart (for me), especially if you only see a flash of them. It would be considerably easier if they stood and modeled, showed off their beak and wing bars
.
Me too. We had this one tour guide during the Great Salt Lake Festival that was amazing. A bird would whiz by and he knew exactly what it was. I have to take a picture, catalog it, etc.
This post would have been helpful last week
We saw baby Rose-Breasted Grosbeaks and were trying to figure out what kind of bird they were. Some kind of sparrows? Or something entirely different? Finally, we saw the parents coming over to feed them and we figured it out. But we should have known all along from the beak!!!
Aw!!! I want to see babies! I can’t wait to see the Rose-Breasted Grosbeaks. They have such lovely colors.
[...] you remember how the other day I was lamenting my inability to remember bird calls because I’ve filled my head with 90’s music? [...]
[...] first saw the flash of orange and black I wondered if the Black-headed Grosbeaks were back. In my post on these birds, I compared them to a Spotted Towhee so my instincts were pretty good. So I came [...]