Apology accepted, but I took no offense. I love the give, take – and snark here at FDL, and feel privileged to have the ear of so many bright people.

Thank you so much for the references. I have the Sibley and Peterson guides, but have mostly been an armchair birder (woe is me), checking out what’s unusual at the feeders. Here on the coast of Maine we get lots of interesting migrants, especially warblers in the spring and raptors in the fall.

One of my favorite occasional visitors to our yard are a pair of pileated woodpeckers. They circle round and round and up and down our pines.

See ya round

You are indeed gracious, & I apologize. Rereading my own comment, I’m embarrassed at sounding like such a know-it-all. Hardly. We just have a pretty handy library of bird books here, so I quickly took a closer look at Amer. Pipit than I had in a long time.

I know our sweet little Chipping Sparrows really well, as they nest in our yard every year. But I’ve never actually seen any of the pipits in the wild, but just had a ‘gut feeling’ about them from hearing of them over the years.

So I joined the ranks of “5-minute experts” — i.e., people who simply go and look it up in a book/on the net/wherever and report what they found. Yes, the range shows it could be possible for them to be there, but some other things about them all seemed to point elsewhere. I’d had the impression that pipits were very unlikely to come around feeders much, & preferred open country. The books confirmed that. . . .

One last thing: the picture did make it hard to tell the species, and that would be especially true on a laptop. I’m sitting here with a pretty large monitor, and even then I had to peer closely at it.

In case you’re interested:
2 wonderful books we really like (tho lighter, smaller guides are much handier in the field!):

Nat. Audubon Soc. The Sibley Guide to Birds, by D.A. Sibley, Knopf
and
Nat. Audubon Soc. The Sibley Guide to Bird Life & Behavior. (same author & publisher)

Our favorite lightweight, handy reference for in the field is the old reliable Peterson series, Field Guide to the Birds.

If you really want to get into it with behavior, habitat, conservation concerns, etc.:
The Birder’s Handbook, by Ehrlich, Dobkin & Wheye, Simon & Schuster (Fireside Book series)

Nuts like us?: http://www.thayerbirding.com/
plus all the links you’ll come across that way.

As a black gay man I have faced more than enough actual violence in my 59 years be able to navigate both metaphor AND metonmy.

Remember the last line of Body and Soul where John Garfied says “What are you gonna do, kill me? Everybody dies.”

Exactly.

“…..you do not know the power of the darkside..”

I did consider its territory when considering the American Pipit, its within its migratory range. But definitely hard to tell here on a 15″ laptop.

I will graciously defer to your and ArchTeryx’s expertise.

LBB indeed!