ID?

[DTro]

These birds just happened to appear out of the blue after the last big snow storm we had.

They didn't look familiar at all. Sorry for the quality.

[bobbymalone]

Those aren't dark-eyed juncos are they?

[Jim Almquist]

From the looks of the blown up picture the one on the far right top looks to have a crest so I am going to guess a Waxwing.

[bobbymalone]

that one does look like it has a crest...

I thought they look grey with a white belly, but that might just be a combination of a bad quality photo and my bad quality monitor.

[Jim Almquist]

They also seem to have a yellow hue on the belly.

[icehousebob]

They sure look like Waxwings to me, but I'm far from a expert.I had a large flock of them land on one of my apple trees a couple of months ago. They fed actively for an hour and then were gone.

Beautiful birds.

[Steve Foss]

They are cedar waxwings.

[DTro]

Thanks, I thought they looked a little dark to be CW's, but with the yellow and the crest it doesn't leave many options I guess.

[Steve Foss]

They only look dark because the camera's meter exposed for the bright sky and underexposed the birds.

[ShawnZ]

100% sure....Cedar Waxwings. Another key to the id is the way the birds are presenting, spacially close in the top of a tree. There are few species that will present like that in the northland, in the winter. Starlings, Cedar Waxwings, Bohemian Waxwings....Offhand I can't think of any others, can anybody else?

[Steve Foss]

I can't think of any, Shawn. But the key of course is to differentiate in this case between cedars and Bohemians, and we agree these are cedars.

[bobbymalone]

I can definitively see the yellow hue looking at it from my home computer.

Foss-man, is there a way to fix the exposure problem for those of us with a regular old point and shoot camera? I have the same problem as dtro when trying to shoot stuff in trees.

[Steve Foss]

It depends on the camera, bobbym. Some P&S cameras have exposure compensation (which allows you to alter exposure to spoof the camera meter) or manual exposure settings. In either case, when shooting darkish birds against a bright sky you want to overexpose the image. That might blow out the bright sky, but it'll get nice detail in the darker birds.

[DTro]

I guess to be fair to the camera I ran the pics through an "auto fix" with my software.

Here are the original images, one with a tight crop

[Steve Foss]

Darren, in this case your autofix did better than the original image.

[MARINERMAGNUM]

A couple of those look a little different-unless it's my monitor?

Crossbills? Hard to tell.