Project FeederWatch

Starting in November I became a member of the Project FeederWatch project from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.  Basically, it entails watching my bird feeders for two days at a time and counting the highest number of birds of different species I see at one time.  For example, if I have five Pine Siskins on the feeder and one flies off and two return, I only count the six individuals at that one time rather than seven total.  This prevents from counting the same individual more than once.  Doing this I have seen a lot of the same birds I have seen frequently at the feeders but have had a few exciting finds, including a juvenile Sharp-shinned Hawk and a Bewick's Wren.  The most interesting to me has been one little common bird, a Dark-eyed Junco.  Juncos are very common in Oregon and in fact the subspecies that is most common here is called an "Oregon" Junco because of it. 

"Oregon" Dark-eyed Junco courtesy of All About Birds

However, the exciting thing about this little Junco is that it is not a typical "Oregon" Junco and is in fact of the "Slate-colored" subspecies.  I have seen this little Junco almost everyday that I do my counts, so I reported it and took some pictures of it to send to the FeederWatch folks.  This is the reply I got back today from the FeederWatch project leader:

Thank you for the report and photo of the Dark-eyed Junco (slate-colored race) at your feeders. Nice find! We receive quite a few reports of “Oregon” race juncos in the east, but few reports of the slate-colored race in the west. I will soon add your report and a photo to the list of confirmed rare birds on the FeederWatch web site.

And here is the link to the rare bird report with my picture on it!
http://watch.birds.cornell.edu/PFW/ExploreData?cmd=rareBirds&speciesGroup=ID3894544&period=PFW_2012

Below are the pictures I took.  Not the best, but they certainly show off the different coloration compared to the typical "Oregon" Junco.

Slate-colored on right, Oregon on left

Slate-colored Junco in our yard

Slate-colored Junco in our yard

Those last two were on the day that the "sharpie" (hawk) was in our yard.  I figured it was hiding from it as it spent a good 20 minutes in the same spot.  It was also very windy that day so that is a possibility too.