Bird Quiz - Name that Bird

[Jim Neiger]

It's not a very good photo, but I thought it might be fun to see how long it took for someone to correctly identify this species. Give it a try. If nobody gets it, I'll add some clues.


1D3, 500mm+2xTC, hand held, 1/1000, F9, ISO 800, manual exposure

[Mike Tracy]

Not confident but will guess European Goldfinch.

[Jim Neiger]

Not confident but will guess European Goldfinch.

That is incorrect.

[Jim Buescher]

How about a Gouldian finch?

[William Malacarne]

May be a Gouldian but is defiantly a mutation and not a normal, or could also be a hybrid.

Bill

[Jim Neiger]

How about a Gouldian finch?

You are correct! Congrats!

[Jim Neiger]

May be a Gouldian but is defiantly a mutation and not a normal, or could also be a hybrid.

Bill

It is not a mutation or hybrid.

Here is another look at the bird:

[Mike Tracy]

I at first was going to guess Goulidan but looked at a image I took years ago and did not see enough similarities.

[Jim Buescher]

Thanks Jim. To be honest, I'm no bird expert but knowing you've been posting birds from Australia, that narrowed my search. I'm not familiar with this bird, is this individual a female (duller plumage than male) or a non-breeding male? My reference books look more like Mike's image.

Jim

[Jim Neiger]

Jim,

It's an adult male. The plumage varies quite a bit and most images you see are birds that have been bred in captivity and many of the photos are oversaturated. My images are of wild birds with no boosting of the color saturation.

[William Malacarne]

The second bird posted is a female and the bird Mike posted is a male...the colors look corect on both with about normal saturation. The bird in flight has no upper color on its chest is why I said it may be a mutation. There is a white chested and it is a mutation that can be normal in a wild bird. The chest on the flight bird appears to have some color in it but it is hard to tell if it is a juvi or not. Wiki has some pretty good general info on them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gouldian_Finch

We used to raise these back in the late 80's to mid 90's.

Bill

[Linda Dulak]

Jim: I breed Gouldian finches in captivity. My favorites are the natural green backed birds that you have shown here.

My birds are much more saturated in color than the native one you show -- if the color is correctly rendered. I don't think most people oversaturate the images of the captive birds. I suspect that the captives have, perhaps, a better, more complete diet than the native bird you show. I know most of the breeders take great pains to provide a very complete diet to their birds. The purple breast does not look dark enough for a nice male gouldian -- and it's definitely a male from the color of the beak and the clear head color. Diet can have an immense impact on the colors since many of the pigments are based on vitamin A modifications.

The color of my birds is between the picture of the wild bird and the picture submitted by Mike.

Would love to see these birds in the wild!

Linda

[Mike Tracy]

Edit: Innocently failed to disclose that my post was of a captive bird taken at Butterfly World in South Fl.

As Linda noted diet plays a huge factor in a animals colorization. I have been keeping saltwater fish and corals for over 30 years and can attest that environmental conditions most notably essential vitamins and trace elements or the lack of influence appearance.

[Jim Neiger]

The second bird posted is a female and the bird Mike posted is a male...the colors look corect on both with about normal saturation. The bird in flight has no upper color on its chest is why I said it may be a mutation. There is a white chested and it is a mutation that can be normal in a wild bird. The chest on the flight bird appears to have some color in it but it is hard to tell if it is a juvi or not. Wiki has some pretty good general info on them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gouldian_Finch

We used to raise these back in the late 80's to mid 90's.

Bill

Bill,

Both of my posts in this thread are of the same bird. It is a wild adult male.

[Jim Neiger]

FYI: The wild male birds have three different head/face colors. Black face is the most common followed by red faced and the last color which I forget. The images I posted above were made in a very remote area in the Western Australia Outback. We were on a little used dirt track in an imense cattle station in the Kimberlys.

[Linda Dulak]

Jim: The other head color is orange. It accounts for a very small percentage of the birds, but in the males is quite spectacular. And yes, the most common head color is black even though the red is the dominant color. But black is more common because it is sex-linked and population genetics are such that it becomes much more common than the dominant red.

Jim, is this the area which was hit by the hurricanes about 2 or 3 years ago? I know there was quite a bit of effort at reintroducing birds into the wild and they had observed young birds. But then the hurricanes hit and there was fear of loss of these birds. Any information you gleaned while there about the numbers, increasing, decreasing?

Linda

[Jim Neiger]

Linda,

The area where this image was made was not affected by cyclones. The biggest threat to these birds and many other species is fire. In Western Australia the birds survive on the seeds of the grasses that grow there. Each year massive fires burn huge areas of grasslands and destroy much of the food source. Then when the grasses regrow they all go to seed at the same time, so there is a lack of food at other times. They are now using controlled burns to cause the fires to burn at different times in different areas so that the grasses go to seed at different times and the birds can move with the availability of food. They actualy start fires using helecopters and flaming kerosene filled ping pong balls. We attended a presentation on this subject at Mornington Station which is a huge cattle station that was purchased by the Australian Nature Conservancy. The problem they have is lack of funds to keep these programs going and to make their methods effective.