Birding at Voice of America (VOA) Park near Mason, OH
..continued from a post last week on a male Bobolink molting into his Basic non-breeding plumage at VOA Park.I stopped by the park late friday afternoon to see how far along the male Bobolinks were in their molts. It had only been five days since I was last there, but boy had they changed!
He has lost almost 50% of his black
feathers. The change is fairly quick!
If you look closely, you can see he is losing
the pigment in his bill. It's mottled black now.
Check my other side...I'm quite handsome in
my "tortie-shell transition phase."
He will molt all of his feathers including flight and
tail feathers. He does not lose them all at once,
so he is never rendered completely flightless
While walking through the mowed areas of the meadow, I heard three Henslow's Sparrows in the middle...and a single Henslow's Sparrow in the area closest to the little parking spot by the big tree. There were also five Willow Flycatchers hawking insects using the big tree as a base. If you want to learn more about the Henslow's Sparrows of VOA, head over to my friend's new blog, Everybody Funny. He surveyed VOA from 2001 to 2007 weekly and accumulated a lot of research on the Henslow's Sparrows nesting there.
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