[rdoudna]

My 10 year old daughter and I recently became interested in birding and she's gotten pretty good at IDs. We saw this one in Jan. at a local park and we thought we'd find it right away in our field guide but no luck. I'm sure it's something easy and common, can you help?

[Joern Lehmhus]

American Robin (Turdus migratorius), I think

Best regards, Jörn

[Jane Turner]

seconded

[Storm-Petrel]

Yes, it is an American Robin. They are fairly common throughout the US

[jcwings]

And it goes by one coloquial name: "Robin red-breast"

[Dave Hall]

Hi Your bird is a American Robin

[Terry O'Nolley]

Yes, this bird is an American Robin, but I can see the confusion if you consider the fieldguide paintings as gospel.

The white around the eye and the splotchy red breast could be quite confusing if you are a new birder and relied completely on the field-guide descriptions.

A quick hint that may come is handy for you: Next time you have a bird to ID that looks almost like a bird in your field guide but not quite, take note of the name and continue searching. You may end up with several. Then check out the BirdForum.net gallery database or Opus for actual photographs. If nothing else, it will help you appreciate the variety within a given species and will probably nail down the ID for you.

And Welcome to Bird Forum!

[rdoudna]

Thanks Terry, that was exatly the problem, I've seen thousands of robins (and it happens to be my name) so Told my daughter it was a robin, then we compared the pic to the field guide and didn't see the splotchyness on the breast, so I thought I'd double check it here. I'm going to put up a few more pix that we weren't sure about, hopefully you'll chime in again.


[quote=Terry O'Nolley;919959]Yes, this bird is an American Robin, but I can see the confusion if you consider the fieldguide paintings as gospel.

The white around the eye and the splotchy red breast could be quite confusing if you are a new birder and relied completely on the field-guide descriptions.