I started my twitching career in 1983, a few months after a confiding juvenile Long-toed Stint turned up in the UK in September 1982…a first for Britain at the time, but since demoted to the second after a review of a spring bird in Cornwall in the 1970s.

A short-staying bird in Sussex, UK several years later faltered due to distance and identification issues before being embraced as such after the bird had long since departed. It had remained a blocker ever since.

During a recent trip to the UK in October 2021, a Long-toed Stint had been present inland near Leeds, UK not far from my home near Wigan. It had been present for a few days and as soon as I touched down, I borrowed my sister’s car and made a beeline for it. Thankfully it was still present on this crisp October morning. Finally after 29 years! Boom!

I do look hard for Long-toed Stints, it is a bird I fantasize about finding in the east, but with no records east of the Mississippi, it is a rather needle-in-a-haystack venture. I arrived in Salinas, California in the fall of 1988 with Geoff Kingery and David Sibley and a juv. Long-toed that had been present at Salinas had unfortunately departed prior to our arrival.

I do look at Least Sandpipers though and this one caught my eye – not that it stood out as anything but a Least – but it showed a pale brown base to the bill vaguely reminiscent of Long-toed and also a vague split supercilium. Leasts typically show an all dark bill and I don’t remember seeing many that I checked, showing this pale spot. Anyway, just thought I’d post these shots of this nice individual.

Here’s a scan of my notebook from a visit to China from a decade ago when we saw a few alternate-plumaged “leggy” Long-toeds showing:

• broad, rusty-fringed tertials

• short bill with pale base

• structurally reminiscent more Pectoral Sandpiper.

• classic pattern on the median coverts with the dark centre bisecting the fringe, (noticeable on the worn feathers on the Swillington bird).

It will be a sharp birder that picks out a mid-Atlantic Long-toed.

Here is a case study of an individual in 2011. Nick Bonomo and I visited a bird coming to the feeder in nearby Guilford to see if we could slap a moniker on it, or at least try and get spread tail shots to help determine it’s identity – in Allen’s, the outer three tail feathers are narrower than in Rufous, so it was our mission to try and photograph the bird’s spread tail.

I confess to being confused with some of these birds, it’s a group I’m not that familiar with and so each time we get one of these it’s quite a learning experience, not only identifying them, but especially trying to age and sex them. Howell’s excellent Photographic Guide to Hummingbirds of North America was our reference.

We saw the bird well and photographed it from a distance, but unfortunately in the time we had, we were never able to get shots of the open tail, so it was destined to remain unidentifiable. According to Howell, one feature of adult female Allen’s is a propensity to have the uppertail coverts strongly fringed rufous. Our bird had some obvious rufous fringing , but without a baseline, our lack of experience left us asking “how much is enough?”. With Mark out of town, banding at present wasn’t an option, so it seems destined to fall into the selasphorus sp bin until Mike Moccio got  great shots of the spread tail which confirmed the bird to be a Rufous.

A cool bird, and as usual a challenging and educational experience! For instructional photos of an Allen’s banded in PA in 2009 see here: http://home.earthlink.net/~pomarine/id93.html

Looking at these images the narrow pointed tail when seen from behind seem rather different from the broader, full tail of our bird. Also, in the flight shot note the obvious rufous uppertail coverts, perhaps two features to key into?

Here’s a shot of a (AHY female?) Rufous that was banded by Mark and Jane back in 2006.

For readers in need of a basic primer on the Rufous/Allen’s ID issues, see Sheri Williamson’s post from Life, Birds, and Everything:

http://fieldguidetohummingbirds.wordpress.com/2010/09/06/rufous-vs-allens/

More interesting notes from Sheri on the Guilford, CT female, who kindly took the time to add the following:

“Not only do molt patterns in other families not translate well to hummingbirds, but even generalizing from one hummingbird species to another in the same genus can lead you down the wrong track!

Like most highly migratory northern hummingbirds, Rufous normally undergo the most important parts of the molt (flight feathers and gorget) in winter. My first-hand experience with overwintering Rufous is limited, but the BNA account indicates that primary molt takes place mainly from late December through March, with females running 10+ days behind males. (Calder didn’t distinguish between age classes, but juveniles often average later onset and completion of primary molt than same-sex adults.) For a juvenile female, primary molt at P6 inmid-November (more than halfway along) would be ~8 weeks down the early side of the bell curve for Rufous, though apparently consistent with our limited understanding of molt in Allen’s.

Outlier characteristics often catch our attention, but attaching too much importance to them too often results in unproductive detours. As an extreme example, focusing solely on this bird’s primary molt would make HY Anna’s and Costa’s, both of which replace primaries mainly from early summer through late fall, stronger candidates than Rufous.

The diagnostic “pinched” tip of R2 is subtle, but it would be extremely unusual to find on a juvenile female and unusual *not* to find on an adult female or juvenile male. Here’s a new addition to my Flickr gallery that illustrates this difference: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tzunun/6385547925/in/set-72157619893017097/

Had R2 not been visible in any of the photos of the CT bird, the contrast in the gorget feathers would still have suggested a juvenile female, though with less confidence.

Within the “bee” hummingbird clade that most Americans and Canadians are familiar with, juvenile females are typically most “generic” in feather shape and pattern, while juvenile males and adult females tend to be more similar to each other than either are to juvenile females. This is one reason that I encourage birders to familiarize themselves with the broader aging and sexing criteria for hummingbirds before taking on the more challenging species.

If you know of any local/regional organizations that might be interested in a workshop on hummingbird identification and natural history, I’d be delighted to hear from them.

 Good birding,

 Sheri”