Hermit Warbler in Central Park
Technical details: I did all image processing in Photoshop and cropped them close to 100% to show as much detail as possible. I made some global exposure adjustments to compensate for poor lighting and underexposure, especially when the subject was backlit. No color adjustments were made, and no selective adjustments or sharpening was applied. The photos were taken with an Olympus OM-D EM-1 digital camera with a 40-150mm f/2.8 lens and 1.4x teleconverter attached. The sensor has a 2x crop factor, so this translates to a max equivalent focal length of 420mm in 35mm terms, which is not much reach for warblers, but is better than no camera at all :-)
The images were captured in Raw mode and RGB colorspace , with white balance set to Auto. They were converted to sRGB prior to saving as JPEGs.
I do not use this camera very often, and it wasn't till after I got home that i noticed two things:
1) the ISO was set to 100, so the shutter speed of the majority of my shots was 1/100s! Oops. This is the main reason the images are so blurry.
2) the time stamp was still set to EST, not EDT, so all the recorded times were one hour too early.
NB: This bird was was not reported by anyone after the initial sighting. Hopefully it will be refound so that others can supply better photographs and some audio recordings. When I posted the original report to online forums with pics, I called it a "mystery warbler" and addressed the possibility that it was a hybrid. Subsequently there were many discussions about it on- and off-line. Will leave it to the experts to decide, but the general consensus so far is that it is a 'Hermit Warbler', i.e., either a pure Hermit , or a mostly pure one.
A link to the eBird checklist is here:
http://ebird.org/ebird/view/checklist?subID=S29384376
The sighting was reviewed and accepted by the eBird reviewer.
1 May 2016: Hermit Warbler in Central Park (cropped to ~100%)
Side View showing a dusky auricular on a yellow face, and almost no streaking on flanks. Underparts are white, with no hint of yellow in the vent. The upperparts (back and nape) are dark. Wings are dark, with two white wing bars. The black throat is in the shape of a small, neat triangle with clean margins., which is typical of an adult male.
1 May 2016: Hermit Warbler in Central Park (cropped to ~100%)
View from below showing white underparts with almost no streaking, white undertail, no yellow in the vent
1 May 2016: Hermit Warbler in Central Park (cropped to ~100%)
View from below. Neat black triangle on throat (less black than on a male Black-throated Green). White underparts and no streaking. White outer tail feathers.
1 May 2016: Hermit Warbler in Central Park (cropped to ~100%)
From this angle, the face looks almost uniformly yellow and the underparts uniformly white, though the image is blurry.
1 May 2016: Hermit Warbler in Central Park (cropped to ~100%)
Another side view that shows a yellow eye-ring and dusky auricular. Wings are dark, with two white wing bars. Nape is dark and tapers to a thin line going up the back of the head. Underparts look mostly white, and plumage looks wet.. The bird was backlit and some global photo exposure adjustments were made post-processing.