Date: 11/7/26 10:31 am From: flyingcarlini via NEBirds <flyingcarlini...> Subject: Re: [NEBirds] AOS updates feat. UNK Ornithology
Great to know David, thanks for sharing that! On that topic, Pieplow says subsingers can also be i.d.ed to species. We recorded a subsinger last month that despite his messy songs, at times included the intro buzz diagnostic of Easterns that looks like a smudge on their spectrograms (as opposed to what's described as the tuk tuk intro of the Western song).
-Shari
On Saturday, November 7, 2026 at 12:21:04 PM CST, David Cunningham via NEBirds <gopacgodc...> wrote:
Shari,
I hope this helps. Dave
https://ebird.org/news/2026-taxonomy-update During migration, either species could show up in Wyoming, eastern Colorado, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, eastern New Mexico, most of central and western Texas, and widely throughout Mexico. If you’re birding in any of these areas, make sure to note whether you identified a singing bird by its song. Because there are almost no plumage differences between the two species, most records from areas where their ranges overlap during migration and winter will need to be entered as the slash (Eastern/Western Marsh Wren) unless the bird was heard singing.
On Sat, Nov 7, 2026, 12:11 PM flyingcarlini via NEBirds <flyingcarlini...> wrote:
Hello NEBirders,Still futilely agonizing over whether there's any way to confidently i.d. silent Neb. migrant and wintering marsh-wrens near the edge of their ranges. Made a screenshot comparison of an Eastern and Western who both have medium hue plumage, as many individuals from both species do, and had to go back and double check they were indeed different species because they look so darn similar:
-Shari Schwartz, Lincoln On Tuesday, November 3, 2026 at 09:46:24 AM CST, flyingcarlini via NEBirds <flyingcarlini...> wrote:
Hello NEBirders,Below is a collage of Western Marsh-wrens specifically in our area created as a personal primer if by chance the oompressed image is helpful to anyone else. All pics are from Neb. except the one from LaCreek SD just across the border that was included for its surprisingly bright reddish upperparts. Tried to represent the broad spectrum of individual plumages and omitted pics from June through fall to avoid juvenile plumage. Body parts shown with color variation all over the map: crown, flanks, breast, and face. The one uniform characteristic so far is flanks always seem to be a lighter color than upperparts in our Westerns - to varying degrees - but never a comparable hue vs the flanks in SOME Easterns that are nearly equally as reddish as upperparts (such as the bird on our checklist).
