This week I’ve been looking at birds, so I thought I’d share the joy with you. Do you have any thoughts about what this might be?
I expect that quite a few of you will have a pretty good idea, so please keep your suggestions cryptic, to let people who are less familiar with avian identification have a chance of improving their skills.
Have fun!
Zygoma 
Little brown jobbie. Always a little brown jobbie. Why can’t we ever get one of the exotic dinosaurs?
Goes off to thrash about google images hoping a half-remember name might just through up summat with a bill like this and feet like these.
Why couldn’t it have been taupe and lavender and scarlet?!
mutter grumble
Returns horrified from googl3e images: who’d have thought there would be so many NSFW pictures for the word “bird”.
Decides to use nous instead.
Gives up on nous, possessing none.
Cheats and throws out a suggestion that this might be from a family first named in 1815 by Rafinesque. Bacislly, a silicaceous rat enchanter.
More wrong guesses later…
This looks like a common waterside bird, the A..s h..s. However, it has a few spots on its chest, so it may rather be his American cousin, A..s m..s
Anyone else Tri-ing-ta answer this nebulous question finding it chilling?
The features that give it away are very well preserved for a dusty, faded, old stuffed bird.
Elizabeth Bishop’s familiar – In 1976, three years before she died, she wrote:
All my life I have lived and behaved very much like […] – just running along the edges of different countries ‘looking for something’. I have always felt I couldn’t possibly live very far inland, away from the ocean; and I have always lived near it, frequently in sight of it …. timorously pecking for subsistence along coastlines of the world.
I think she was referring to the common type, this looks like the spotted one. 🙂
🙂
I think I spotted that too… 😉
Eh! You guys get up too early!
I’ve been tri-ing ta get my head around this as a common or spotted Whatsis, but I’m not happy with the angle and placement of the eye. I’ve tried to enlarge the photo to see if the head is tilted and that’s why it looks like a common or spotted Whatsis with a woodcock head glued on, but I can’t get it to happen.
I was trying to rely on the colour of the legs but the ones that have this characteristics in their common names have spotted tail feathers, that is not the case here. Rather short-footed with a grey tail …
I’ve often seen you, or someone who looks like you on the beach. So cute, but alas I do not know your name.