Zebra-Head

Greetings from the road! It has been a week out now and it has been a mixed bag of good and bad – fortunately, more of the former. The weather has started out rough, but the last couple of days has been fantastic. We brought the wrong tripod head for Linda’s planned waterfall pictures, but we were able to remedy that today with a drive into Portland, OR. Grateful they were open on a Sunday of a holiday weekend and even more surprising had the exact head we needed. Just for the record, we really have no interest in going back to that city and I’ll leave that there. So far, challenges encountered, challenges surmounted. Best of all, the birding has lived up to expectations. Even though I haven’t moved into full birding mode I’ve been able to add 42 birds to my count with 8 lifers putting me at 342+3 for the year – and #556 in the US yay! 60 more birds to beat last year’s record, I think I can do it.

Unfortunately, I am not doing very well with staying on top of the posts for this month and technically behind – big thanks to Brad for keeping me above water. Kicking back into things with another entry in the “May I have another chance” series.

Prepare yourself to be underwhelmed and hit the jump to learn about this Zebra bird.

I first saw this bird at the Paton Center for Hummingbirds in Patagonia, AZ. This is clearly not a Hummingbird and not where I expected to find this bird. It was on my top 5 target for the trip, which is why my less than crisp shots when I did get the chance stings a bit. I don’t know what the issue was, but shot after shot in the digital darkroom was soft or obscured or headless or, hell, not even in the shot at all.

I pulled the best of the lot and worked them over in the digital darkroom until they were battered and bruised to give you something that looked better than a finger painting. Although I personally think this bird should have been called the Zebra-Head Titmouse, it was actually given the name Bridled Titmouse of which I admit is a bit baffling to me. Warning, my experienced in all things Horse related wife is not nearby at time of this writing, so any/all statements that follow are unverified. The “Bridled” name comes from the distinct facial patterns on its head that looks like the bridle gear they use on the heads of Horses. Adding to this name mystery, they don’t even know where the scientific name, Baeolophus wollweberi comes from. I say we ignore its given name by French ornithologist Charles Lucien Bonaparte and from this point forward just call it the Zebra-Head Titmouse – who’s with me!?! Before you ask, I have already given the shortened name “Zebird” to the Black-and-White Warbler.

Zebra-Heads are regionally constrained to southeast Arizona with a swath that extends down into Central America. In the US, we have 5 species of Titmouse. The Black-Crested is a Texas specialty (link here). The Juniper predominantly roams the southeast (link here), The Oaks is native to California and happens to be the only Titmouse that remains unchecked on my life list. The Tufted is clearly the dominant species as it covers pretty much the entire eastern half of the US and manages to wake me up every morning with its non stop calls for “Peter”. For god’s-sake Peter answer him before I lose my mind!! … I digress….

Like all Titmice, the Zebra-Head has the flamboyant crest unconstrained by gravity. This one is a bit more distinguished than the Black-Crested with its white streaks – word has it Tulsi Gabbard copped her personal style from this Mouse. If that fact shows up in an AI summary for her, we will have proven what is causing the nightly heavy hits of our WP blogs.

Yikes, time has gotten away from me and we need to drive to Washington tomorrow, so going to have to wrap this up. You might be asking yourself why someone would find a Titmouse at a place specializing in Hummingbirds. What I didn’t know before getting there is they have trails through their adjacent woods behind the feeders. This area is absolutely full of great birds. If you recall, this is where I spotted the Plumbeous Vireo in a recent post (link here). Definitely take a walk through there if you happen to find yourself in the area.

Ironically, my other sighting of the Zebra-Head Titmouse on our Arizona trip was at another place famous for its Hummingbirds, the Santa Rita Lodge at Madera Canyon – where the following shot was taken.

I’ll be covering both the Paton Hummingbird Center and Santa Rita Lodge in future posts – those are two spots I highly recommend visiting on any trip to southeast Arizona.

By the way, I’ve now lost the ability to manually insert by HTML borders around my images thanks to WP ending the classic blocks. B. from the UK (link here) has given me a potential workaround, but too busy right now to fight through that so my images are looking a bit naked – apologies.

Take care everyone!