Hi, everyone. Thanks in advance for reading. I am very new to birding, and I apologize for not having a photo, but I saw this bird on a short walk during my lunch break last week and didn't have a decent camera handy. (My office abuts a saltwater wetlands preserve; watching all the birds there during my lunch is what piqued my interest.) I will do my best to describe the bird adequately.
The bird in question was small, approximately the size of a sparrow. It was a dark bluish-gray color, with a long tail. As it flitted from tree to tree ahead of me on the walking trail, I could see that the underside of the tail was white. When it landed on a high branch, I was able to walk underneath it and see that it had a white patch on its fat little belly that extended down to the underside of the tail. The rest of the neck and head were that same dark bluish gray. (I did have my binoculars, so I got quite a good look.)
After lunch, I looked through my bird app and decided that it was a slate dark-eyed junco. I was satisfied with this identification until today when I read that the slate morph junco is only found in eastern North America. The pictures of the western "Oregon" morph I found really don't match what I saw.
Does anyone have any idea of what it could be? I looked at all of the birds that my app and my field guide say are similar to a dark-eyed junco, but none of them seem to match. Is it possible that there are slate morph juncos in the west?
Again, thanks for reading. I hope I didn't get too TL;DR.
The bird in question was small, approximately the size of a sparrow. It was a dark bluish-gray color, with a long tail. As it flitted from tree to tree ahead of me on the walking trail, I could see that the underside of the tail was white. When it landed on a high branch, I was able to walk underneath it and see that it had a white patch on its fat little belly that extended down to the underside of the tail. The rest of the neck and head were that same dark bluish gray. (I did have my binoculars, so I got quite a good look.)
After lunch, I looked through my bird app and decided that it was a slate dark-eyed junco. I was satisfied with this identification until today when I read that the slate morph junco is only found in eastern North America. The pictures of the western "Oregon" morph I found really don't match what I saw.
Does anyone have any idea of what it could be? I looked at all of the birds that my app and my field guide say are similar to a dark-eyed junco, but none of them seem to match. Is it possible that there are slate morph juncos in the west?
Again, thanks for reading. I hope I didn't get too TL;DR.
