On May 12, our SFO group at Arnot saw a brown creeper do the same pose but vertically on a trunk, remaining fully camouflaged when doing so. I wish I had my camera then. Anyhow, I assumed it was sunning itself, a reasonable assumption on that cool day (40s-50s). The fact that your gnatcatcher did it on this 90-degree day makes one wonder if something else is going on.
In South Africa I saw a speckled mousebird sunning itself in what I thought was an odd posture: http://suan-yong.com/s.africa.php?s=Mousebirds&k=101618 I later learned that this was common behavior for mousebirds and helps warm the stomach to digest the leaves it eats (digesting leaves is slow and inefficient and tends to work best in cow-sized beasts with multiple stomachs, not easy to pull off in a bird, though the hoatzin has managed it). Suan -- Cayugabirds-L List Info: http://www.NortheastBirding.com/CayugabirdsWELCOME http://www.NortheastBirding.com/CayugabirdsRULES http://www.NortheastBirding.com/CayugabirdsSubscribeConfigurationLeave.htm ARCHIVES: 1) http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/maillist.html 2) http://www.surfbirds.com/birdingmail/Group/Cayugabirds 3) http://birdingonthe.net/mailinglists/CAYU.html Please submit your observations to eBird: http://ebird.org/content/ebird/ --
