• Welcome to BirdForum, the internet's largest birding community with thousands of members from all over the world. The forums are dedicated to wild birds, birding, binoculars and equipment and all that goes with it.

    Please register for an account to take part in the discussions in the forum, post your pictures in the gallery and more.
ZEISS DTI thermal imaging cameras. For more discoveries at night, and during the day.

Picture in gallery, Cuban Crow or Cuban Palm Crow (1 Viewer)

I checked the roughly 6-8 photos of both species to make sure the id worked both ways. It also works on the photo by MiddleRiver earlier in this thread.
Niels
 
I gave in and looked :) - yes, what a weird bird Cuban crow is indeed: big curved banana-shaped bill with incredibly-long gape. I can't remember what I thought of it in the field, but I do remember on Hispaniola how odd and un-crowish I thought white-necked crow was: has similar bill and gape, I see now in photos. Those two are surely worth a genus to themselves.
 
I'm an armchair observer here - googled all the images I could find. In those images, to my eyes, Cuban Palm Crow's bill is significantly shorter, noticeably so. But much of the text for diagnostics either doesn't mention that feature, or says that the difference is slight.

The only exception to this in the images I found was one of the images in the following link - and that is the same image as the one from the gallery in the OP!

Cuban Palm Crow – birdfinding.info
 
Not the best markup but what I'm seeing...
OP Cuban Palm on R
My Cuban on L
View attachment 1571866
Placement of the eye circle in the second image is incorrect. It's much closer to the bill, i.e. needs to move 45 deg down towards bottom left. This makes it more marginal under the new criterion. On balance I decided just about ok, but certainly not as clear as e.g. Ebird images
 
This makes it more marginal under the new criterion.
I disagree - I think it's a clear-cut distinction, even in this case where the exact position of the eye really isn't clear (I remember looking at the photo earlier and thinking that I just couldn't tell where exactly the eye is). In my opinion it's clear in the specimen photo that the gape does not extend further back than the edge of the bill itself, and thus it must be clear of the front of the eye, let alone the rear of it.
 

Users who are viewing this thread

Back
Top