Just when you thought it was safe...

When you thought, "It's May, let's see some pleasing warbler photos," like this Myrtle taken on the back porch this morning as a tanager sang above it...

When you thought, "Well, maybe there'll be some interesting migrants or year birds," like this Merlin which looks much paler than the usual merlins we see in the southern LP (basically because we mostly see females or first year birds); per Sibley and Wheeler, this is probably a pretty typical taiga male Merlin, not a candidate for Richardson's.

Or maybe you thought that we'd relocated a quality rarity like the Lark Sparrow then BAM, in comes another Collared-Dove photo, again from Tiscornia this morning, a noticeably larger blockier bird than the Mourning Dove that Tim picked it up flying in with. The dickcissel yesterday was my 200th St Joseph Twp lifer, this was dangerously close to being that milestone bird (Horned Lark was 200 for Benton last fall - even though I know you weren't actually wondering). A couple of weeks ago a co-worker had described to me a big white bird with a ring around its neck that was on someone's lawn in a neighborhood close to Tiscornia that "wasn't a [Mourning] Dove." My guess then was that she'd seen a Collared-Dove. I had expected that we would have heard it by now from Tiscornia but perhaps the winds have been wrong.