tags: Wren, Winter Wren, Troglodytes troglodytes, birds, mystery bird, bird ID quiz

Please name at least one field mark that supports your identification.

Rick Wright, Managing Director of WINGS Birding Tours Worldwide, writes:

A tiny bird with a thin bill and a cocked tail, dark brown with a big supercilium and a bit of barring on the flank: it can only be a wren, and given that we find ourselves in Scotland with this mystery bird, it can only be a Winter Wren, a species that as currently recognized is the only one of its family to occur outside of the Americas.

The rub here, of course, is “as currently recognized.” There are three or four dozen subspecies identifiable throughout this taxon’s holarctic range, two or three dozen of them in Eurasia, the rest in North America. It seems likely that at least a three-way split is in the offing for the “Winter” Wrens, and even homebody American birders like me can make a contribution to our knowledge of the distribution of the various subspecies and subspecies groups. In mainland North America, Winter Wrens divide neatly into eastern and western birds, easily distinguished by plumage (golden-brown and dappled in the west, dark brown and heavily barred in the east) and call note (nasal and Wilson’s-Warber-like in the west, husky and Song-Sparrow-like in the east).

Review all mystery birds to date.