Female Bronzed Cowbird in Madera Canyon

This is a female Bronzed Cowbird from Madera Canyon, taken at the end of May, and I'll admit its not the bird most people make the drive for. Madera gets the trogon. and the hummingbird crowd, and nobody puts a cowbird at the top of their list. She's a plain grayish brown all over with a little buff on the belly and a heavy pointed bill that looks about a size too big for her head. The giveaway is the eye. That red eye is the field mark on a Bronzed Cowbird, and it jumps right out in the image.

I like the pose a lot. She's looking back over her shoulder with her head tucked down, like somebody just said her name in a grocery store and she's deciding whether to turn around. One foot is forward on the branch and you can see those long curved claws hooked over the bark, especially the back toe on that front foot. The little pale patch at the base of her neck isn't a marking... it's most likely just the feathers parting as she twisted around.

The males are the flashy ones, glossy black with a bronze-green sheen and the same red eye. In spring they puff up a ruff of feathers on the back of the neck and hover in front of the females, which I'm sure looks a lot more impressive to a cowbird than it does to the rest of us. Females get none of that. What they get instead is the cowbird lifestyle, since Bronzed Cowbirds are brood parasites. She doesn't build a nest or raise her own young, she lays her eggs in other birds' nests (orioles are a favorite) and lets them do all the work, so it's hard to feel too sorry for her about the plumage.

In Arizona they're mostly a summer bird in the southeast part of the state, showing up in spring and hanging around through the breeding season, which puts the end of May right in the thick of it. Madera Canyon sits in the Santa Ritas just south of Tucson, close enough that I'm down there more often than I probably need to be.

The background went to a soft wash of greens and tans, and that helps here because there isn't much color on the bird to carry the picture. Everything depends on the eye being sharp and the feather edges on the wing holding their detail, and they did. The gray branch running across the bottom with the little twigs off to the right gives the frame some shape without pulling attention away from her. Not a rare bird, not a colorful bird, but it held still and looked interesting doing it, and some days that's the best a photographer gets.