So Cool

Red-throated Loon

Today I received one of those dreaded letters from the eBird reviewer. I had yet again misidentified a bird. I am pretty careful to run anything I am not sure of past an ID group or two, so it doesn't happen real often.....still.....I hate to make mistakes.....(and I appreciate the nice folks who keep eBird honest and try to let my mistakes serve as a learning experience for me.)

However, sometimes I see something that looks a little different, pooh-pooh myself as overthinking it, and list it anyhow.

This time I photographed a loon out on the river by the confluence with the Schoharie and called it a Common Loon. It actually looked a little different to me, but it was in eclipse plumage and I have been wrong thinking commons were something more uncommon all too often. Saw the darned thing four or five times over successive days and photographed it, but discarded the pics as too low quality. It was a lo-o-o-n-g way out in the river....

Comes the letter. The bird was a Red-throated Loon, a lifer for me and the first county record. I'm kinda kicking myself that I didn't go with my first impression and put it up on What's this Bird? to be sure what it was, but on the other hand I am just so darned excited that I can live with getting it wrong. In fact, happy dance....literally.....Hope we see it again