On Mar 4, 2006, at 5:31 PM, Paul Stenquist wrote:
Nice shot. I enjoyed it. If it's a robin, it's different than the robins I see here in the north central US. Just saw my first robin of spring a few minutes ago. Thought about getting out a big lens, but I figured he'd be gone before I could get ready.
It's a robin all right, the REAL robin. We do not have robins in the Americas. The bird commonly called robin in the USA is actually more properly called migratory thrush (Turdus migratorius). The early settlers of the USA were not naturalists, mostly coming from cities, and they got nomenclature all screwed up. They called vultures buzzards, when a buzzard is actually a type of hawk. They didn't just screw up birds, they also got mammals wrong. They looked at elk and instead called them moose. They looked at native wapiti and called them elk. They really made a mess of it for those who came along later and wanted to reconcile US names with European names.
Bob
