Bird ID quiz - ID this chick for fame but not fortune!

OK, since I've not captioned my new photo CD yet, I thought this would give me an opportunity to pose a quiz.

 

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Just as a break in all the strictly photo questions, for fun - I don't propose that I or anyone else make this a habit!

 

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Here's the address:

 

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<a href="http://donb.photo.net/photo_cd/e/b46.jpg">

http://donb.photo.net/photo_cd/e/b46.jpg

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What species is this chick? How do you know?

 

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Now, in a lame attempt to justify this, does anyone know of a field-sized guide to chick ID? They exist in large form, but I don't know of any handy field guide. It's not really much of a problem (I told you this was lame) as the parents to chicks are usually nearby, but could be useful if one photographs just the chicks then forgets what they were.

I'm not really a bird watcher but that little guy looks like a Sandpiper. My second guess would be some species of Plover.

I KNOW!!! I KNOW!!! I KNOW!!!

But since I have a number of shots of the guy or his brothers & sisters also & i know how tall he will actually get when grown, I won't give this one away. But it is a good shot Baccus. (by the way, I paid the parents to clean him up before you came back to shoot him & they signed a model release too)

Keep smiling & the idea of a field guide to chicks isn't bad.

SHHH, DAN!!!

 

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Rick, you're warm...this chick is in the order charadriiformes. This, though, is a big order, with families including shorebirds, auks and puffins, gulls, jaegers...

 

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As it happens, this chick is not in either the family charadriidae (plovers) or scolopacidae (sandpipers and phalaropes). But at this age they look much like chicks in those two families!

Hmm...this is a tough one. I would have guessed sandpiper too. OK then, I'll say maybe a Stilt or Avocet? My gut tells me that's wrong but I'm stumped!

OK, Jason's gotten into the right family with the only two North American birds in that family - recurvirostridae. Good job!

 

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So, Jason, this will be a dead giveaway for you, so you "shush" too, for a bit at least to give others a chance to think or cheat with a bird book:

 

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What color legs do stilts have?

 

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What color legs do avocets have?

 

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What color legs does the chick have?

 

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The chick came with a little Peterson field mark arrow pointing to the leg color, but I removed it in PhotoShop before posting the photo :)

I think Dan was just twitching to say Avocet. ;)

Rick, you're right, Dan was wanting to shout "avocet!", especially since he's the dude who pulled up to me and said "if you want to shoot avocet chicks, just head down the road a couple hundred feet!".

 

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That's when I met him, and then came back to find out he'd discovered photo.net during my road trip.

 

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Small - and at times nice - world!

 

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This was an early hatchling from the generation of eggs which were destroyed in the infamous road-grader incident. When I came back a few weeks after this, there were a couple of half-grown avocets around so at least a few of these hatchlings survived, even though those which hadn't hatched yet were omletted out of existence by the big yellow machine.