Here's a couple of photos of (presumably the same bird) reported as a possible hypomelanistic Sandhill or Whooping Crane hybrid. That head coloration is 100% inconsistent with Whooping Crane, and Whooping-Sandhill hybrid.
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151585948353939&set=a.10150724081468939.459701.114200373938&type=1&theater http://www.wunderground.com/wximage/taosmtngirl/355 Very cool bird! :-) Compare with this similar looking bird from 2003 in AZ http://www.sabo.org/photoalb/whitsand.htm and this (putative?) Whooping-Sandhill hybrid from Bosque Del Apache a few years back (ignore the photo captions that call it a pure Whooper!): http://www.nationalgeographicstock.com/ngsimages/explore/explorecomp.jsf?xsys=SE&id=499196 http://www.joelsartore.com/stock/BIR003-00080/?search=common%20nighthawks&sequence=66&num=40 http://www.joelsartore.com/stock/BIR003-00081/?search=common+nighthawks&num=40&sequence=67 http://www.joelsartore.com/stock/BIR003-00094/?search=common+nighthawks&num=40&sequence=72 http://www.joelsartore.com/stock/BIR003-00121/?search=common+nighthawks&num=40&sequence=73 So why does the 2013 bird look more like a pure sandhill with pigment problems, and not a Sandhill-Whooping hybrid? The big feature that jumps out at me (after zooming in on the photo) is that the whooping-sandhill hybrid shows some dark at the base of the bill, remnants of that big black "moustache" of Whooping Cranes. This area is otherwise uniformly pale gray in sandhills. Right-clicking the facebook photo and zooming in with my browser, this bird appears to have a pale cheek right up to the base of the bill -- very much reminiscent of Sandhill -- although it would be nice to have higher-resolution There have been captive Sandhill-Whooping hybrids produced -- anyone aware of any online photos of these birds? It would be handy to know if this facial coloration is a reliable characteristic to separate hybrids from aberrant sandhills. :-) Good Birding, Paul Hurtado -- Paul J. Hurtado Postdoctoral Fellow, The Ohio State University Mathematical Biosciences Institute, http://mbi.osu.edu/ Aquatic Ecology Laboratory, http://ael.osu.edu/ Webpage: http://www.pauljhurtado.com/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Colorado Birds" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
