I am back in Chicago, and Matthew asked me to post the solution to “Where’s the Ptarmigan [read “nightjar’] post. Here it is:
by Matthew Cobb
A tough one – you couldn’t enlarge the photo, and the bird was some way away. But I managed to spot it! Kate said to me on FB: “It was really tough to photograph, whenever it stopped moving I lost track of it!“
As I understand it, light drives the change of plumage and if it doesn’t snow, white birds tend to stand out. Little snow in Alaska this winter, same as a few years back when I was there, so it might have been a tough year for ptarmigan.
A tale about the town of Chicken, AK, possibly apocryphal,is that it got its name because of the large number of ptarmigan resident there. Seems none of those old sourdoughs knew how to spell ptarmigan so the town of Chicken was born.
Even with the cross hairs, it’s just too damned small to see.
How about this one:
Spot the Ptarmigan
Seems almost as fair.
…ah, good one, Jeff!
Impossible
Maybe it’s the product of a misspent youth hunting and shooting reinforced by a lot of dog walking in the countryside with one eye open for wildlife, but I spotted it immediately. I thought it was too easy at first but after a long hard look everywhere else there was no other option.
Generally it’s movement that gives the game away in real life so a photograph is a far harder challenge but there’s something which kind of leaps out to the practiced eye. Or it could be a sixth sense, some kind of variation on water divining. Who knows.
Tough one.
I was going to change my original answer to smack dab in the middle, because it looked like there was a birdie there, but I didn’t think it distinctly screamed ‘ptarmigan’! 🙂
(So what I thought was a pile of feathers was really a pile of pebbles. 🙁 )
Still don’t see it!
I’m in the “still don’t see it” camp.
Um, what about the nightjar?
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