What Is It?... ROUND 1

Yeah, I started counting all over again. This is round one of the 2013 season.

What Is It? is a weekly (or bi-weekly... or every once in a while...) bird identification contest I publish on this blog. It's rather simple: I post a photo I've taken of a bird, and you all post comments with your guesses as to what species it is. Here's a more detailed rundown of the rules:

The Photo
     For each round, I will post a photo from my collection. Difficulty of identification varies depending on the quality of the photo and what aspects of the bird are visible. I will typically include some background information about the photo, such as where and when it was taken. Pictures may be blurry, dark, or otherwise obfuscated--it's supposed to be a challenge!
     Sometimes the picture contains more than one species of bird. Each species is scored separately.


Identifying the Bird
     All sorts of identification methods are at your disposal. Field guides are typically best, though the internet can also be good for browsing through bird species. Identification work must be your own--no copying off other peoples' work or asking another birder to do the identification for you. Once you have a guess for what species the bird is, post a comment with your answer. I don't really care whether you use common names or scientific names. Once I see that you have posted, I will mark your comment as spam. This temporarily deletes it, preventing other competitors from reading your answer.
     From time to time, I may ask questions other than simple identification. I could ask questions about the biological adaptations of the bird pictured, show an unlabeled bird picture and ask you to guess which state it was taken in, et cetera. But most of the time, it will be an ID challenge.


Scoring
      I've decided to redo the scoring a bit. There used to be an point advantage for answering first, but some people might have automatic blog update alerts that could give them an unfair head start. Here's how it works now: you get
     1 point just for posting a comment with a guess. Yay! You're actually trying!
   +1 point for guessing a bird in the correct taxonomic order
   +1 point for guessing a bird in the correct taxonomic family
   +2 points for guessing the correct species of bird

for a maximum total of 5 points per species.

Ten illustrious front-runners will appear on the leaderboard, which I will update after each challenge. I reserve the right to modify the rules if some people are over-proficient with identification. Maybe I'll establish a "major league" version with even more difficult photos...

Walkthroughs
     When I post a new What Is It?, I will also post the correct answer to the previous challenge, along with a quick description of which field marks should have been useful for identifying the bird. You might start noticing trends with what to look for. Hopefully these walkthroughs will help you learn strategies for bird identification.

So now, on to Round 1...

Ready? Set? Identify!

The following photo was taken in May of 2013 in Busey Woods in Urbana, IL.This species is visible in the CU area this time of year, but they are typically in a different molt and thus do not look like the bird below.

Click to enlarge.

This bird shouldn't be too hard to identify. I need to get a sense how good people already are at this kind of thing, so I decided to start with a half-decent photo.

Answers are due by 23:39 on Friday, October 11.

Have fun!