When you have been birding, have you ever had someone ask you to name a bird he or she sees? If you are wearing your binoculars, you are an easy target for that kind of question. This is a true little story of what happened to me one day at the Kachina Wetlands Sanctuary just outside Flagstaff.
I was walking along the big pond on a lovely Spring day. The Wetlands sports a huge number of species and, on that day, they were doing their usual territorial best to attract my attention. I was not alone. A pair of ladies of a certain age walked up to me. I could tell that they were not birders because they were not wearing the mandatory binoculars. I turned and smiled, knowing what kind of question they would ask me.
“Hi, young fella. (I was immediately flattered) what’s the name of those black birds with the red wings?” This was not what I wanted them to ask because I had to answer: “Those are Red-winged Blackbirds”. They paused and looked at each other as if to decide whether I should be believed or reported as some kind of wise guy. They decided to try one more.
“What’s the black bird with the yellow head?” Oh, no… anything but that. There are lots of birds here. Why must they ask about that one! But I could not lie and blurted out the only correct answer: “Those are Yellow-headed Blackbirds.” Dead silence. Then they both turned and walked away from me never to be seen again. What should I have said? Maybe: Yellow headed swamp rats? Certainly not red-sided polecats.
It does give me pause to wonder about how some birds get their names. Sometimes ornithologists seem to have an odd sense of humor and sometimes they just seem to lack imagination.
During migration, Yellow-headed Blackbirds can be seen here: Bubbling Ponds