WINGSCAPES

What Color Goes With Orange?

In order to help protect them from predators, the plumage of many birds closely matches the colors and often even the patterns of their habitats. Plovers are generally a dusty tan color to match the ground on which they nest, female ducks are commonly streaked with brown and black to help them hide in the reed beds of ponds. But then there are the male songbirds…

 
Bold and bright to ensure their visibility to potential mates, the males of many bird species, especially the songbirds, spend part of their year sporting the most vivid of colors that certainly don’t camouflage them in the least.

However this brilliantly orange male Baltimore Oriole, uploaded by Patty from Sheffield Village, OH, seems to have found a solution to being both brightly colored and blending in with his surroundings at the same time.

It's All In How You Approach the Problem

In life, some challenges are a little more daunting in others. While some obstacles are easily overcome with the resources at hand, the solutions to others are more elusive and require far more creativity for the problem to be solved.

 

Take the one faced by this Baltimore Oriole in an image uploaded to the BirdCam Photo Gallery by Jeanne of Gretna, Nebraska. The feeder appears to have no convenient perch upon which to rest so as to easily feed on the luscious grape jelly it holds. No matter – the clever oriole simply adopts a common chickadee or nuthatch feeding posture and takes a perpendicular approach to solving the problem.

Ode to an Oriole

In her poem "To Hear an Oriole Sing," Emily Dickinson famously wrote "To hear an Oriole sing / May be a common thing— / Or only a divine." Miss Dickinson was almost certainly writing of the Baltimore Oriole, perhaps the most famous songster of the orioles appearing in North America.

What would Miss Dickinson have written about others of the oriole family, such as this pair of Hooded Orioles recently posted to the Wingscapes Photo Gallery by Pam from Redwood City, California? With their faster, choppy, and sometimes raspy sound, would the Hooded Orioles have inspired such praise?

BirdCam Life List Reigning Champions

Shirley and Wayne from Cottonwood, Arizona keep sending us great shots. These were some of their first photos!

Here are a few of the pictures they have sent us that we have added to our BirdCam Life List.  They have also submitted the Verdin, Crissal Thrasher and the Gambel's Quail.

Shirley writes:

Here is a picture of the hooded oriole - male taken today, May 5, 2008 in Cottonwood Arizona. We noticed that you did not have one posted on your life list of the Wingscape bird cam webpage.

We are new at this - actually today is the first day that we have had our camera.

We have quite a few more birds that come in regularly to our feeder that are not on the life list, and I want to send them as I get them...

Black Chinned Hummingbird - this is the cutest little guy. Note the dark throat and white line under black on his throat. He's a nice purple...

Our only other one up here right now is the Anna's. Down in southern AZ there are so many other species and it's a real treat to go hummingbird watching down there.

Bullock's Oriole - this is the oriole that we have out west that is like your eastern version.  Note he has a dark back of his head, as compared to the hooded oriole that I sent in a few weeks ago. We also had the Scott's oriole, but of course, we haven't seen him since we got the bird cam.