On February 22, 2018, Ken Brown challenged ABC members to the game of Stump The Experts, and it was as funny and fun as the WOS version that inspired it.

Maggie Tieger, on right, explains her reasoning.

As game administrators, Ken and Ed Pullen, took potshots from the contestants. Those “expert” contestants consisted of the entire crew, divided into two sides, led by Ryan Wiese and Diane Yorgason-Quinn. Ken had a bunch of slides of birds that were not obvious as to identification and offered each slide to one side or the other, and Ed ran the projector, timed each side, and kept the score. Many of the photos were by Ken and Heather Voboril and a few others in the club. Some were ancient history and were very hard to decipher (Rustic Bunting — really??).

We had deep discussion on the recent controversy over a photo from Seattle that some thought was a Broad-winged Hawk and some thought was a Cooper’s. We had a couple of Coops in this contest, too.  Some of us still think that Flycatcher was a Hammond’s, not a Pacific-slope! Of course we didn’t have the opportunity to see what it did with its tail or hear its call.  One interesting aspect of the contest was that the perceived real experts (B.L., M.R., for example) were as stumped as the rest of us on a bunch of these!

One of Ken’s washed-out slides!

At the end, it appeared that Ryan’s side had won, although Diane’s side had pulled up pretty close. A final score was not actually mentioned, as everyone was deep into discussion of the finer points when our time was up. As we broke up, a slide showing a dead Carolina Parakeet as a woman’s hat decoration brought up back to the reality that that species went extinct 100 years ago yesterday.

Why are these people smiling?

Can we have trophies next year, Ken? First and second place?  Or perhaps Booby prizes (Blue-footed and Red-footed!).

After a few failed attempts yesterday I finally recorded a bird song on an iPhone app called “RODE rec” and was able to post it onto an eBird list. Seems simple but it took me enough struggle to post step by step directions here. First is just the app. RODE rec was chosen because of online reviews suggesting that it is a reasonably good free app to record wave files. You can record using the phone recorder, but you get a less usable type file.

On opening the RODE rec app you will need to go through a registration process, but on future openings you’ll see something like this:

To make a new recording just click on the + icon at the bottom. Then you’ll see a screen like this:

All you need to do to record is tap the big red “Record” button, then when you are done tap on the green “Stop” button.

This much is pretty simple. I had difficult getting the recording to play. The trick is to swipe the gray band on the bottom all the way back to the left so that it resets to the beginning. After recording the gray band is all the way to the right, i.e. finished. See this screen shot below of the “finished” recording:

Compare to this one after swiping the gray band back to the far left:

Next I just emailed the recording to myself. To do this select the recording you want to send, and tap the “Upload arrow” on the upper right screen. Choose email, send the file to your self.

Then you move the recording from your email to a location you can drop and drag it to the “media” section on eBird (just like dropping and dragging or selecting a photo). One thing to note is that unlike a photo which is immediately visible on your eBird list, the audio file takes a while to be processed. My first one was able to be listened to on eBird by the next day.
https://ebird.org/view/checklist/S42754617

I believe using a microphone or parabola will give a better recording, but this one with just my phone was passable and I’m pretty happy with it. Good luck. Ed

I knew that the blue color of most birds is not a pigment but rather due to feather structure, and that the iridescence of hummingbird gorgets and some other iridescent bird colors is also non-pigment related, but just how this works was hard to wrap my brain around. I just stumbled onto a nice, short article on the Cornell site that reviews these different ways birds have color. Enjoy:

How Birds Make Colorful Feathers