Tuesday, April 25, 2023

Clay-Colored Thrush

I just did a post on the black-billed thrush, a bird we saw a lot of at Tinamu Reserve in Colombia. There was another similar bird, the clay-colored thrush, I was looking for. The primary difference between the two, as far as I knew, was a black bill for the one and a clay or lighter colored bill for the other. I left Tinamu and Colombia pretty certain I'd gotten a number of photos of the clay-colored in addition to the black-billed. However, as I started looking at my photos I was dismayed to find that birds I'd thought were clay-colored were actually black-billed, with banana smeared on their bills from the feeding stations. I ultimately determined that I'd seen no clay coloreds. Then this evening as I was looking through the photos again, getting ready to delete them, I spied what I thought might be a clay-colored and got a positive result on iNaturalist. I'm thrilled!
The clay-colored thrush is the national bird of Costa Rica. It is found as far north as south Texas and northern Mexico down to northern Colombia. 
Clay-colored thrush range - from Wikipedia.
It looks quite similar to the black-billed thrush except for the bill that is greenish-yellow with a darker base instead of black. 

1 comment:

  1. That's a Jimmy Durante beak. It looks really big compared to the head.

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