northeast-flora-and-fauna

For Throwback Thursday here's a Common Yellowthroat I met about 5 1/2 years ago. Despite the "common" part of the name, I don't actually encounter these birds a whole lot; this picture was taken back when I was working at Alcatel-Lucent and going on my after-lunch walk. I suspect this is an immature female; you can contrast her with an adult male here . I don't think there's enough yellow for this to be an adult female, and I see no hint of the black mask that should be starting to form if this was an immature male.  Yellowthroats are a type of a much larger group of birds, the warblers . Though the males are pretty distinctive looking, the females are harder to recognize. September 18, 2017 at Murray Hill Photo 10808625, (c) jpviolette, some rights reserved (CC BY-NC)

Here's a bird I hadn't seen in a while before meeting one late this June, a Common Yellowthroat . The yellowthroats are a genus of warbler, and despite my field guide's views on their abundance (and despite their name) this is only the 4th picture I've gotten of them [1]. And even if they're fairly common, my Sibley field guide describes them as "secretive" while the All About Birds webpage accuses them of "skulking". Fortunately this fella was desperate enough for companionship that he was singing right out in the open. I've had even worse luck with relatives of the Common Yellowthroat. Even though Kentucky Warblers potentially breed around here, and Mourning Warblers will at least migrate through the region, I've yet to get a picture of either. (While both those birds are categorized as yellowthroats, only the Kentucky Warbler has as yellow a throat as the Common Yellowthroat; the throats of the Mourning Warbler seem to go gray by ad...