Oh Crap, Another Tyrant

I am excited to announce that today marks the official 5th week out from surgery! Let me get my calculator out..tap, tap, tap, tap 6, tap tap tap, minus, tap, tap, 5, tap, tap, carry the one, tap, tap, divide by PI, tap tap invert, tap log, tap, tap….tap tap tap equals…YES the answer is 1. That’s right, only one more week left in this 6 weeks of no weight hell. I now have firsthand experience how people can go batshit crazy. That will just get me to the boot, but PT will start that day and physical pain means strength and strength is the road back to the trail! To my credit, I have been keeping busy since getting the stitches out. Maybe a bit too close to former “work”, I’ve been in front of the computer for hours on end each day getting caught up on the photo queue (almost done with Texas March 2024), tackling the heavy lifting posts (2024 Haunted Trail recap), producing the Intrigued Haunt YouTube tutorials (Haunted Tree) and doing my very best to get caught up on all my post reading – whew!

In case you are interested, here are the links to the 2024 Haunted Trail recaps:

Trail of Fears 2024 – The Clearing, the Build and then the Panic – link here
Haunted Trail 2024 – The Dark Woods – link here

I’ll put the latest tutorial video at the end of this post for those that want a behind the scenes look at how we created our 9′ by 10+’ haunted tree in tribute to the previous broken elbow “incident” – yes, the Root of all Evil!

Of course, we know the main reason you are here and that’s feather watching – we have something for that as well.

Gray Flycatcher found at Catalina State Park outside Tucson, AZ in January 2024

Today’s featured feathered friend is a fitting selection for the “hard work” theme. Hit the jump to learn a bit more about this diminutive bird.

Ever have those times where you know your next move is going to result in a lot of work in the future. I definitely get that feeling whenever I start work on a new Halloween prop. No matter how much I plan it out, it is ALWAYS going to take longer than expected (did you see that.. Linda just rolled her eyes!). That haunted tree is a fine example of that – we were learning big time on the fly with that build. Turns out that same experience happens whenever I come upon members of the Tyrant group

Gray Flycatcher found at Catalina State Park outside Tucson, AZ in January 202

Not in all cases, I have become familiar with several in the Tyrannidae family over the years. A few are more flamboyant like the Vermilion Flycatcher (link here) and Scissor Flycatcher (link here). Others I get good looks all summer long such as the Eastern Kingbird, Eastern Phoebe and Eastern Wood-Peewee. Still others we get well acquainted with on our trips down south which includes the Great Kiskadee, Say’s Phoebe and Black Phoebe. Trust me, there are many more in this grouping that I am sure every birder out there comes close to tearing their hair out trying to identify – I’m looking at you Empidonax Catchers (don’t get me started with Adlers vs Willows).

Gray Flycatcher found at Catalina State Park outside Tucson, AZ in January 202

Subtle shades of grey through green paired with minimal highlights ranging from olive to yellow – some with wing bars, a smattering with bi-colored bills and although some can be sub-grouped by size and perch posture, that still leaves intensive detective work to get it down to one or more like two or three. It usually goes like this in the field:

Think I see a movement over there
Yes, definitely a bird
Wait, it just left, no it just came back to another perch near where it left (dread starting to swell)
Yes, it is definitely make multiple sorties
Please have some color or markings I know, please, please, please! (mouth going dry)
Small stature, dull wash of color
Bring the Beast on point while saying way too loudly “OH CRAP ANOTHER TYRANT”
Click, sigh, click, sigh, click sigh.….

It just occurred to me that my backlog is really due to the absolute dread of spending hours in the digital darkroom pouring over pages and pages of Tyrant identifiers and NOT pure laziness on my part (there, did you see that, Linda just did it again!)

Gray Flycatcher found at Catalina State Park outside Tucson, AZ in January 202

Clearly this Flycatcher fits this dreadful ID classification. This little fluff ball was found while Ron and I were exploring Catalina State Park outside of Tucson, AZ back in January of 2024. I have talked about this particular state park several times in the past. It is absolutely gorgeous and one of my favorite birding locations (link here). We were on their 1 mile Birding Trail loop when I noticed this small grayish bird sitting quietly in a clump of trees off to the side. So still that it was really hard to get Ron’s eyes on it – “see that clump of trees, now that small opening between the leaves, not that one, up more, over more, there is a tiny ball of feathers perched on a tiny branch, other branch, the one it just left and went to another impossible spot to describe.” Eventually we got on the same page, then the hard work really began.

Gray Flycatcher found at Catalina State Park outside Tucson, AZ in January 202

Getting shots of this ~ 5.7″ bird was an absolute struggle. The Beast was playing autofocus ping pong between the nearby branches and this devious Tyrant was hell bent to keep something between it and our cameras. What I did manage to get in the tin is technically embarrassing, however, this is the only looks we could get of it and it was a +1 for both of us! I should see if Ron got better shots and update this post if he did.

Very thin eye ring, that really tiny pale mark just in front of the eye (see shot above), bi-colored bill, subtle but wide wingbars and fits the diminutive size of the Gray Flycatcher. Region was within parameters as they are a western bird with breeding, migration and nonbreeding bands all converging across Arizona (for some reason they despise California). I also happened to know that they were being spotted here based on the eBird reports we checked before driving out there. Had we been later in the year I would have definitely had to wrestle with differentiating from the Hammond’s (shorter tail) or the Dusky (which is duskier ha).

Gray Flycatcher found at Catalina State Park outside Tucson, AZ in January 202

Another good take on the Gray is their tail behavior. According to Cornell’s website, they will habitually dip their tails down (Note, Duskies flip their tails up). We did not see that distinguishing characteristic on our encounter. Guessing it was trying to stay motionless to inflict as much agony as it could on our birding souls. Definitely want to head back there on a future trip and try for better shots – something tells me it is going to be the same story “Oh crap…”

I promised you a look at our video from the Intrigued Haunt Department and here it is:

Unlike the previous video tutorials, I was not able to be in front of the camera for this one thanks to the ankle. This was also before we started videotaping the build process so we only had pictures taken along the way to use in explaining how we put it all together. It is revealed in the video, but we did have a mishap with this prop just before the guests were to start arriving that was a huge disappointment. Looking forward to having Revenge out in its full glory for this year’s event.

Take care everyone, thanks for coming by. Everyone at Intrigued appreciates your time and we always enjoy hearing from you in the comments area.

45 thoughts on “Oh Crap, Another Tyrant”

        1. Well, from a Midwest perspective, we are pretty slim in the beautiful birds category, fortunately, our travels take us to the premier birding locations which brings most of the fodder on this blog. Happy we can share our finds with everyone!

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    1. Now that made me laugh out loud. Trust me, I’ve done everything I could including public shaming, but to no avail. I’ll continue to work on him while we are out in the field together – nothing like brotherly prodding. He is still in the grind and I know he has even even added some more hobbies now (recently guitar) so I know his time is probably running short. Oh, and I don’t want to impact his available time for Halloween prop building as the trail event is just around the corner. Hmmm, maybe I’ll wait to prod more until November!

      Thanks for dropping in B., always good to hear from you.

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    1. To my credit, I do plan on following orders during the upcoming PT phase although I will definitely insist on knowing what the bare minimum and absolute maximum I will be allowed to do for each exercise – you can guess which end I’ll be on hehehe. I have to say, these last 5 weeks have been good input for possible future decisions. Let’s also not give Linda any ideas!

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    1. Ha, you gotta watch the cute ones, they’ll get you hooked and the next thing you know you are carrying their grocery bags and building them expensive nests! Take care John and be careful with that heat out there.

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    1. Thanks for watching the video Tim – thankfully I got the time whittled down on this latest one. Shooting for less than 30 minutes with a target of 20 for future ones as that feels like a sweet spot to get conveyed what I want to on the build side and not burden people with having to sit for too long. I do my best to interject some comedy when I can to help the viewing process. I checked out your AI music generation recommendation and that worked amazingly well. I’ve been fine tuning my parameters and generating a number of options for themed music for the YouTube channel. I am not monetized so no issues with having to upgrade beyond the free description which is nice. Will revisit if I ever go monetized.d Thank you for that suggestion – will hopefully debut one in my next video. I must say, it is a bit alarming HOW good that site was. Even the first attempt with nothing more than give me a haunted theme with heavy guitars and in the vein of Lost Boys soundtrack was amazing. Even the generated lyrics fit the Halloween theme perfectly. Will continue to explore what I can do there! Take care and thanks again for taking the time to watch the tutorial.

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      1. Comic relief is always good. I try to be funny, but people seem to take me seriously. Frustrating. I look forward to hearing the music you come up with in upcoming videos.

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        1. …or your smarty comedy goes over their heads ha. Working up a new video now so hoping to incorporate the new music in there somewhere. I have been reading/watching the war on Rick Beato by Universal and that is a bit scary so want to make sure all is good before I start incorporating it. Hard to be held for licensing fees when you generated the music…but not sure how much they are drawing from real songs to create it. Definitely kept my screenshots of my prompts in case anyone tries raising a licensing issue. I am non-monetized which limits the risk tremendously.

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          1. You won’t run into licensing issues with your AI music. It gathers and assembles so many bits and pieces of music samples that it’s impossible to tell where any of it came from. SoundCloud and YouTube see all my AI music as original.

            The other issues with AI are that anything AI has scraped from Facebook is owned by Meta. Anyone who signs up for a Facebook account gives up their rights to anything they upload to Facebook. That’s why I scrubbed my FB account years ago. I think people keep their ownership on Instagram, but I can’t say for sure because I have not read Instagram’s user agreement since I don’t have an Instagram account.

            One can argue that anything created by AI is stolen content because AI relies on previously uploaded content no matter what form and medium. We are preparing office documents to upload into our private AI we are building so we can train the AI to replicate work that is done over and over again.

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            1. I am definitely not a FB guy. I do have an account with exactly two contacts, my wife so I know what she is posting about me (although I never look) and my brother as we were initially using it to get alerts from Texas birders. Definitely would not give up my rights to anything. I also do not have Instagram or X…one mighty consider me a non-neophile. Been in the IT world for way too many years and trust no social media and barely tolerate YouTube as there is not an alternative with any reach. More alarming to me is the AI propensity to make shit up out of thin air to support an assertion. A) I don’t know how software would do that and B) if you can’t trust it consistently, then you can NEVER trust it. I am getting a bit confused between AI and the old term “automation”. Mundane tasks were wiped away with automation tools years ago, I am not seeing the nuances with the AI introduction. All I can say is I’m glad I do not have deal with that anymore ha!

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            2. It makes sense that AI makes stuff up, because it’s just pulling together random info that seems to answer your prompt. The models are getting better at telling you they can’t answer the question or say its response is as close as possible, but might be wrong.

              I still work in IT, and we are building and training a proprietary AI for the office. We’re really getting into the nitty-gritty on AI. At the same time, I’m getting frustrated with the image generators and their snowflake sensibilities.

              SoundCloud has a feature for Pro subscribers where they send your song out to 1,000 possible listeners. My latest song didn’t qualify, I assume, because it has “Hell Fire” in the title and lyrics. It did that to me on “A Blue Psalm” because it’s a prayer asking why the person has been abused. I’m getting sick of being censored by apps I pay good money for.

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            3. I am waiting for that tipping point when I lose my distrust for AI..but I think it still a looong way off. I know my brother really likes his AI software as a means to quickly do some research and get him in the ballpark on some topic. His gives all the references it uses so he takes it from there. What I fear more than anything is the complete annihilation of young coders who grow into real systems analysts and problem solvers who learned the principles of logic from doing it – no they will be simply generating code with absolutely zero understanding of how it was put together or worse why…damn, I must be getting old and crotchety.

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            4. Oriana, who is the lead on building the proprietary AI for the office, seems to understand her coding pretty well. She uses projects she’s working on for the office for her school projects. That way, she gets paid for doing her homework. She was showing me one school project that had a really clunky interface. She said she wanted to create a more elegant, easier to use interface, but the professor won’t allow it. I told her that’s the difference between an academic and a professional.

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            5. I still remember my first program I ever wrote for my employer. Worked my ass off on it, many off-hours… it was an absolute thing of beauty. Proudly went to my team lead, showed him the program, handed him my code listing and waited for the applause and carrying off on the shoulders by my colleagues. To my udder surprise, he looked at it, threw it in the garbage can and said it was “time to leave the academic field and learn how to code in the corporate world”. He then took me under his wing and showed me how it was done. Concise yet readable, storage compression, memory optimization and most of all – speed of execution and in those days that meant squeaking out every bit of CPU performance you could. I never forgot those lessons and ever grateful to his guidance. That is when I realized most of the professors in the academic world had never programmed a line of production code.

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            6. Some years ago, we had a new planner fresh out of architecture and planning school. I’m from the geography side of planning, which is different. Her contribution to the first plan she worked on was totally academic and unrealistic. We ripped it apart and returned it full of red lines and comments in red. The redlines were crushing. She never recovered and finally quit, still bitter about us being so inconsiderate and not recognizing her brilliance. She was a proto-snowflake.

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            7. Yikes! I know the workplace has changed since I retired, but even those last years the entitled new hires were coming in and demanding we bend the knee to their superiority. Luckily I didn’t have to deal with those individual very often as most of my time was spent with seasoned IT architects, but you could see the writing on the wall – “I’ve been here for two weeks, I deserve a raise” crap. If she can’t take criticism/correction she isn’t going to go very far in life I’m afraid.

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            8. I don’t know what happened to that woman. I don’t care, either. The young women I have working for me now have very good work ethics and are solid as ice compared to snowflakes. I’m really thankful for them because I can work part-time now. They are willing to take care of IT stuff, but I had to repair the toilet for our tenant yesterday. They aren’t too into learning building maintenance, but I’m sure they would if I asked them to.

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            10. I had to fix the toilet next door in our tenant’s space last week. One moment I’m working on AI, the next minute I’m dealing with crap, literally.

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    1. Glad you liked the video Cheryl, thanks for taking the time to watch it! As you know, Halloween is our thing and always fun to share our creations – especially those that do not get to experience them during the haunted trail event. Recovery is progressing. Been a tough 5 weeks, but now seeing the light at the end of the tunnel where I get out of the air cast and into a walking boot (for 4 weeks). I’ll be able to get around then and start physical therapy the same day I get out of the cast which I am elated about. I am sure Brad and Linda are going to keep me on the straight and narrow through the whole process. Take care and appreciate the well wishes.

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  7. At least the bird afforded you enough still moments to show all the major field marks! I can definitely relate to “the dreaded empid” feeling. It really does help to have them vocalize, to have Merlin on hand for support, and to try to put it all together at the end.

    I have come to the conclusion that if I cannot ID an empid in the field in real time, it’s not worth the vexation to try to interpret a certain field mark a certain way after the fact, and I resort to the empidonax sp. category.

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    1. You are definitely correct there, had it been flitting about the place it would have been absolutely impossible to get anything in the tin! Love the “dreaded empid” comment – perfectly sums it up. Merlin is a HUGE help in the field. Not always correct, birds do not always reveal their vocalizations, but when those two come together, absolutely amazing and huge help in the field. As I tell Brad and Ron, it isn’t always what Merlin find for us, but just as helpful for confirming what we think it is and allowing us to learn, get immediate feedback and most of all – get “off” the hunt for birds that are less important. No more chasing to confirm a White-Eyed Vireo and more time after that odd call just picked up in another direction.

      I can relate to the sp. categories. I have folders set up just for those entries which are full of various Sparrows and those call only distinguishable species like the Tropical/Couch’s Kingbirds and more specific to the Empids, like those damn Alder and Willow FCs. I am getting a little better in the field thanks to the recent FC books published by Cin Ty Lee Ron gifted me. Those have definitely helped in letting me know what characteristics to get shots of if I want any chance of an ID later in the digital darkroom. Appreciate you coming by Tanja and confirming it isn’t just me that struggles with the FC family!

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  8. Of the few tyrants we get on the east mid-atlantic area, they drive me almost bonkers at times trying to ID, I would not survive with having way more types! Very nice captures! I finally got beautiful shots of the Acadian that I am so proud of! 😂 Another week, egads, I know you’re itching to go go go! Hang in there!!

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    1. That Acadian is absolutely adorable! Their small stature with their big “whirp” stops me in my tracks every time. Their populations have been growing around me and the last couple of summers have had very good looks at them in a state park just down the street. Not the easiest bird to get in the tin though, so congrats on that! Oddly enough, this year we had an emergence of additional FCs in the area including the Yellow-Breasted, Alder and Willow – better have Merlin going for those last two. Really excited about getting both the Northern Beardless, Greater Pewee, Hammond’s and Dusky-Capped on our latest trips – look for those in future posts. I’m doing my best to keep my sanity – thankfully lots of work processing the backlog of pictures, posting and Halloween props to keep my mind busy. Appreciate the well wishes! Take care and, as always, thanks for dropping in.

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  9. Hello Brian,
    Just one more week to go – congratulations (to you and Linda☺️).
    The little ball of fluff is very cute and you got some lovely captures. Hope the recovery process continues to be as smooth as possible.

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    1. Hello Takami, good to hear from you again! The Gray is definitely cute, but one of those pains to get the tins if you know what I mean ha. It is probably more of a congrats to Linda, than I, having to put up with me over these last 5 weeks. Brad can attest, I am not a good patient when I am unable to get the crazies out with a long tiring run. I will be a lot happier once I get transitioned into a walking boot towards the end of next week – also start therapy that day so I’ll finally be able to get back to working out – core of my life. hope all is well with you and your husband. Thank you for dropping in and for your encouraging recovery wishes.

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  10. You are the one who has taught me so convincingly that I should keep shooting images of an unknown bird at all angles and positions, even if there are twigs and weeds in the way – that is the only way I’ll have a chance later to ID the bird since <ahem-blush> I haven’t learned all the fieldmarks in advance. Great photos of this little guy, fun to see him all fluffed up, and showing his almost-missable little gray crest.

    Great job on the Tree, excellent effect!

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    1. True, now in the digital world I do encourage additional shots – a change from the film days ha. Along with that, I just made it through my Texas 2024 folder (560G) and basically birding from the den. Added at least 4 birds to last year’s count as a result just through incidentals and what I call “bird swapping” where somehow the bird species changes mid-series which go undetected in the field – of course there are the miss IDs that I have to fix as well, thus the deep dive (which comes sooooo late ugh). Without the added aid of the Merlin app, Ron and I were definitely trying to get every angle in the tin we could just to have a prayer with this empid. Thanks for taking the time to watch the tree tutorial. That was a bittersweet build. Spent so long on it and really excited about showing it off on the trail until I felt that wind whip up and body slam it to the ground. Will get it all fixed up again in a week or so when I can get around a little better and then stake the hell out of it come event time (fingers crossed). Thanks for dropping in Sam and the extra time spent with the haunt department.

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    1. I really liked Catalina. Nice trails, beautiful views of the mountains and yes, lots of birds you many not be familiar with. Note, the sunsetting on the mountains turning them a bright red was absolutely stunning – I need to go find those pictures and maybe post of few of those. You may have to squint a bit through the branches to get good looks at this specimen, it was not one to announce its presence – fortunately, the FCs have a tell-tale trait of out and back sorties so look for that behavior. Appreciate all the well wishes – now into phase 3, the 4 week walking boot sentence. Incredibly happy I was able to start PT last Thursday – now I feel like I am really back on the recovery tracks…and us ultra-guys like to suffer hehehe. Take care and definitely put Catalina on the agenda if you get near there – then jump down south to Madera Canyon which is absolutely incredible.

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    1. Sooooo frustrating, but when you get something in the tin to provide evidence of the encounter – soooo satisfying. I love Wood Ducks, especially the females with those gorgeous eyes – hope you got some good tins! Take care.

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