Correction: Purple Finch!

I spent several hours sitting in the yard to photograph birds this afternoon.  Primary targets were female Rufous hummingbirds on our crocosmia and perhaps the almost grown covey of California quail that visit the yard several times a day.  We're into the summer doldrums here so I didn't expect to see anything different.  Towards the last of my vigil a male Black-headed grosbeak made a brief visit to the yard and I obtained a single, unremarkable photo.

Aside from the hummingbird photos I obtained a male House sparrow feeding one or more young sparrows.  (Oh joy, even more to look forward to this next year!).

 After dinner I decided to try to get a jump on processing my photos and to possibly post a photo or two to this blog.  I was ho-humming my way through my photos when I came across what I had thought was a male House finch getting a drink of water from our water feature, but as I was processing the photo I kept looking at it and thinking that the finch had a very large bill.  I finally focused on the bill and realized that something was definitely afoot... whatever I had photographed, it was not a male House finch.  I thought it was a grosbeak because of the size of the bill, but it was not a species with which I was familiar.  After a little research I thought it had to be a Pine grosbeak... which would have been the third species of grosbeak (in addition to Black-headed and Evening) we've seen in the yard.  I originally published this blog with that identification but this morning I was corrected... it was a Purple finch. 

This brings up an interesting point... I didn't think I could reliably identify a male Purple finch due to its resemblance to a male House finch and have always relied on using the female Purple finch for identification.  (She has a white swath over her eyes.)  After more carefully reviewing the male Purple finch beak and the male House finch's beak there seems, at least in some cases, to be a significant difference.  

So here, rather than a Pine grosbeak, is a male Purple finch!