How to Know the Birds: No. 18, Flickers in the Flick of a Tongue
At my daughter’s soccer practice the other day, I saw an adult male Red-shafted Flicker:
My guess is, The bird’s feeding on ants, said to be favored by flickers—so much so that the birds’ tongues have converged on anteater morphology: sticky, notably long, and with reduced barbs compared to “normal” arboreal woodpeckers. Is evolution awesome, or what.
I walked down the path, away from the practice field, and over by the fence along the third base line of a baseball field, where I saw another flicker. This guy:
Audio procured. And while we’re waiting on Shunk to perform the acoustic analysis, did you notice something else? The bird blinks its eyes several times! Gotta take a closer look at that. Here are videograbs, from the 0.02 sec., 3.63 sec., and 4.99 sec. marks, respectively:
Remember when the Dunn and Garrett warbler guide came out? (And can you believe it’s been almost a quarter century??) Many of us, I think it’s fair to say, were just a bit incredulous about those plates showing warbler after warbler in up-the-undertail poses we’d dismissed as more-or-less useless for real birding applications. But we’re come to our senses, thanks to Jon and Kimball’s book, and ID’ing warblers from below is now de rigueur for birders.
The avian palpebra is destined to be the next big thing in hardcore ID for the serious field birder—you heard it here first. I’m joking. But I haveta say, I’m really starting to get into this matter of learning the colors of birds’ eyelids. Pick a bird. Any bird. Except for the dipper (whose eyelids are famously white), can you tell me the color of its palpebrae?
In the same ball field as the flickers were a bunch of magpies. And like the flickers, they were feeding on the ground. So I took a few photos. For example:
Source: http://blog.aba.org/2019/10/how-to-know-the-birds-no-18-flickers-in-the-flick-of-a-tongue.html
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