Just some clarifications on Bill Whan's interesting post from earlier today.


>        Many have weighed in on the Sandusky Co bird reported as a
> Sprague's pipit without having seen it. Lest we all get carried away,

I must not be getting all the posts from Ohio-birds.  I've seen posts from
only three persons who didn't see the bird in question, and all of them
raised very calm, reasonable points about the appearance, identification,
behavior, and habitat of Sprague's Pipit.  I went to the site and almost
certainly did see the same bird(s) reported as Sprague's Pipit, but I tried
to point that out as diplomatically as possible.


> [about illustrations of juv Horned Lark]
> ... field guide art.  For the latter, there's a good one in Mullarney et
> al.'s Birds of Europe on p. 239. If you don't know both species well,
> judge for yourself how confusible they are.

Killian Mullarney is a wonderful bird illustrator, one of the best in the
world (I've watched him do quick field sketches that could have been framed
and hung up in a gallery), and his illustration in the field guide is
undoubtedly spot-on for a typical juvenile Horned Lark of the northern
European subspecies E. a. flava.  But the Old World races of the species
look noticeably different from those in North America, so it would be a
mistake to try to apply Killian's illustration to our birds.


>  In our region, I looked for accepted records [of Sprague's Pipit]
> April-Oct, and found the following east of South Dakota (MN, MI, OH, TN,
> ON, IL, KY): 11 in April, 17 in May, 11 in June, 9 in July, 5 in August, 6
> in September, and 22 in October.

Of course, "accepted records" are not necessarily valid records.  If there
are summer records of Sprague's Pipits for anyplace like Tennessee or
Kentucky, they should be reevaluated.  As for the others, to include
Minnesota and Ontario as part of "our region" in this regard is certainly
misleading, since western Minnesota and western Ontario lie very close to
the normal breeding range of the species.  You can always obfuscate the true
pattern by lumping enough extraneous data.  Boreal Chickadee is common in
Ontario in August, but I wouldn't use that fact as support for an August
sighting in Ohio.  The fact remains that Sprague's Pipits are not known to
wander far out of range in mid-summer, nor to walk around on open ground for
distant scope views.

I appreciate Bill trying to stick up for his friends, but I don't think this
kind of post does them any favors.  We've already said that we're grateful
to them for getting the word out about their sighting.  As Ethan Kistler
pointed out, Horned Lark was misidentified as Sprague's Pipit just yesterday
in New Jersey, so these things happen.  Even the most skillful and
knowledgeable birders in the world make mistakes sometimes.

Kenn Kaufman
Oak Harbor, Ohio

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