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 cobirds+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to cobirds@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
