Grail Bird?

My husband just came back from Mexico today (the ABA conference in Veracruz) and as soon as he was unpacked (and the laundry machine was going), I eagerly began to examine his photos.  Beautiful, striking birds  appeared before me on the screen. And then along came this bird.  Given the context--exotic birds my spouse got to see and I didn't--and the bird's general shape, especially the cut-off rear end, my initial reaction was "ah, some species of rail that I don't know."  (In my defense the preceding picture was of Gray-necked Woodrail--so I clearly had rails on the brain).  Fortunately, I quickly realized that in fact this was one of my old friends: Great-tailed Grackle, missing its tail feathers.  The eye, too, of course is pale and the bill just doesn't fit a Rail bill.  If I'd been paying better attention, I would have realized that the habitat was more typical of a Grackle than a Rail, too--mowed lawn and concrete.  I know what a Grackle looks like and what a Rail looks like, but thinking about Mexico and expecting something exotic, I merged the two and came up with that centuries old treasure: the Grail -- in bird form, of course!

How Old are You?

I can now generally identify an Osprey when I see one, though in my earlier years I called plenty of Bald Eagles Ospreys.  There is no rest for the wicked, however, and now I constantly find myself trying to determine the age of the sighted Osprey.

At first study (with binoculars), I looked at the eye color and thought that because the eye was yellowish, this would be an adult (juveniles have orange eyes).  But skeptical as I am of using color as my only identification tool--and because eye color gradually changes over the autumn--I turned to the pattern of the bird.  Juveniles, according to Wheeler, have white tips to all the feathers which gradually wear off as the bird ages.  My bird has a few white tips to go with the yellowish eyes, so it seems to me I have an old juvenile bird.

Still not quite sure, I looked into the migration timing of Ospreys.  It turns out that adults and juveniles don't migrate together; adults leave earlier (beginning in late August and early September), while juveniles are on the road (or the telephone pole) later in the month.  I saw this bird in Utah at the end of September.  That timing supports the 'old juvenile' status I have bestowed on this bird.

I'm never quite sure of age--birds, like people, seem to enjoy hiding their real age.  However, my best guess for this one would be that this white-tipped, yellowish-eyed bird (I haven't mastered sexing Ospreys yet) was on its first migration and thus would be an old juvenile.