Day 274: ...and my thanks to Paul John for permission to use/adapt his hilarious graphic, originally submitted to the Bird Phenology Program! It took me a while to find a place to have it printed on a mug, and several trips back and forth before we got it into a form which wasn't either too wide or too tall to fit in the space allotted.
If you're at all familiar with the family of Flycatchers known as the Empidonax complex, this "field guide" will have you in stitches. It begins in the upper left corner with Least and progresses through Willow, Alder, Acadian, Pacific-slope, Cordilleran, Hammond's, Dusky and Gray, culminating in "Buff-breasted with bad backlighting" and "Heavily oiled leucistic yellow-bellied." All the bird heads are identical, an issue most of us have encountered in the field all too many times.
Flycatchers on the west coast are the equivalent of the east coast's "confusing fall warblers" catalogued over several pages in Roger Tory Peterson's book. There aren't as many, but personally, I think they're harder to differentiate.
