American birders were shocked when news broke of a blue thrush photographed on an Oregon beach.
The bird, a male of the East Asian brown-bellied subspecies philippensis, was spotted at the Hug Point state recreation site early April 21 via amateur photographer Michael Sanchez, who did not realize the magnitude of his discovery at the time.
After Sanchez posted his photographs on Facebook, the bird’s identity was established and the local birding vine collapsed.
Sanchez told The Oregonian, “Keep in mind that I’m not an amateur birder at all. But a friend of mine told me that he thought it was a very rare bird. And now, all this week, other people have piled up at Hug Point. to check and locate it. “
This is only the second record in the American Birding Association (ABA) area, following a men’s record in British Columbia, Canada, in 1997. It is also the first in the United States.
Amazingly, a blue thrush was observed 4 days later in the Farallon Islands off the coast of San Francisco, California – about 900 km south of Hug Point – on April 25. Again, the bird is a male of the subspecies philippensis. Given the excessive rarity of this Old World species in North America, it seemed very likely that the same bird was to blame for both sightings, despite the significant distance between them. However, image research shows that the Farallon Islands bird has sophisticated differences in wing and abdomen feathers. , which means that the ABA domain has received its second and third Blue Thrush registrations in the one-week domain.
The Blue Thrush is not the only excessive vagrant observed in the Farallon Islands on April 25; A swallow-tailed gull was also photographed there. This species breeds almost exclusively in the Galapagos Islands and it is very rare for it to straggle north of the ABA zone.
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