A delayed report of a far off-course Siberian Rubythroat sparked a lot of attention from birders in the San Francisco Bay area, and generated interest across the continent (photo by Benjamin Van Doran).

A late Google search of a trail camera’s photos taken at the Google corporate campus in Mountain View, California, resulted in a new First State Record sighting of an Asian flycatcher, a Siberian Rubythroat. This documentation also represents the first sighting of this species in the Lower 48 States. Although the small Asian flycatcher was photographed last November 19th by one of many trail cams installed on the property for an on-going San Jose State University project, it went unnoticed until last week when the trail cam photo was posted on the iNaturalist website.

Birders in the greater San Francisco Bay area were understandably excited, and many continue to check the surrounding area in case the Siberian Rubythroat has overwintered there or nearby, but no recent sightings have been reported to date. So as the dust settles, many birders wonder what took so long to notice the photo of the first rubythroat in the Lower 48 States.

It turns out that the process was protracted by the fact that there are about 40 trail cams set up on the Google property for an ongoing project being conducted by the Castillo Vardaro Lab at San Jose State University. Lab personnel only download the trail cam memory cards every month or 2; then it’s a matter of checking thousands of photos by using a number of computer programs that can identify animals in the photos. Finally, biologists identify the animals’ exact species manually – so it took a while.

Even then, the identity of the small bird standing on the ground in an open area surrounded by tall vegetation was not obvious to the non-birder researchers, so the image was posted on the website iNaturalist. Once posted, birders were quick to identify the small bird as a Siberian Rubythroat, and the word began to spread through the birding ranks via social media and birding outlets. The Castillo Vardaro Lab at San Jose State University combines field and molecular genetics approaches to study questions in evolution, ecology, and wildlife conservation biology, but looking for rare off-course birds is not part of the primary goals of the research that the trail cameras are being used for.

Even so, their attention to something different created quite a stir across the birding ranks, as we wait to see if the rare flycatcher might be relocated. We will keep you posted in our weekly article devoted to rare bird sightings across North America (see Rare Birds). To view the original photo and some of the communications related to it at iNaturalist, you can refer to Siberian Rubythroat from Crittenden Ln, Mountain View, CA, US on November 19, 2022 at 04:02 PM by Castillo Vardaro Molecular Ecology Lab · iNaturalist