Figure 388. Distinguishing M. a. ocularis from M. a. lugens often presents a terrific challenge, and sometimes an insurmountable one. This first-fall female, accepted as ocularis, can be distinguished from a young lugens by its narrow white wingbars, gray crown and nape, and gray uppertail coverts. It was discovered on 16 November 1996 at Bolinas Lagoon, Marin County (1997-032; Keith Hansen).

 

Figure 389. The two subspecies of White Wagtail known to have reached California have tended to do so on different autumn migration schedules. The four fall migrants identified as ocularis were found no earlier than 5 October, whereas six of the seven fall lugens occurred between 20 July and 7 October. The CBRC has concluded that single members of each taxon have occurred during consecutive falls, and each of these occurrences is charted. Not charted is the fall 1996 record of lugens from San Juan Capistrano that the CBRC treated as the return of a bird that had previously wintered there.

 

Click on the image for an enlargement.

Figure 390. This first-fall male Black-backed Wagtail (M. a. lugens), identified by, among other features, the black rump and uppertail coverts and extensively white wing-coverts, was discovered on 3 November 1995 at Bolinas Lagoon, Marin County. The first-fall female ocularis depicted in Figure 388 was found at this locale almost exactly a year later (1995-117; Sophie Webb).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

WHITE WAGTAIL Motacilla alba Linnaeus, 1758

Accepted: 26 (76%)	Treated in Appendix H: no
Not accepted: 8	CBRC review: all records
Not submitted/reviewed: 3	Color image: none

The decision by the AOU Check-list Committee (1982) to accord species status to the Black-backed Wagtail (M. [a.] lugens) cited a finding of only limited hybridization among sympatric populations of White and Black-backed Wagtails in Kamchatka and southern Ussuriland (Kistchinski and Lobkov 1979). These results were later questioned (e.g., Voelker 2002, Alström and Mild 2003), after which the AOU (Banks et al. 2005) reverted to treating the Black-backed Wagtail as a subspecies of the White Wagtail. White Wagtails breed very locally in western Alaska, across most of Eurasia, and in northwestern Africa, Iceland, and southeastern Greenland. They winter across western and southern Eurasia, in much of northern Africa, and in the East Indies and Philippines.

Alström and Mild (2003) recognized nine subspecies of the White Wagtail. The subspecies that breeds locally in westernmost Alaska and west across most of Siberia is M. a. ocularis. In the New World, outside of its limited Alaskan breeding range, ocularis is casual in the Aleutian and Pribilof Islands and in central Alaska, casual or accidental elsewhere. Southwestern British Columbia claims two spring records; Washington’s two records are from winter and spring; and Baja California Sur’s two records are from winter. Additional records come from Michigan (two, only one of them identified to subspecies), South Carolina, Louisiana, New Mexico, Sonora, and Trinidad.

Three other subspecies have been reported as vagrants to North America, with M. a. lugens accounting for the lion’s share. These birds breed from Kamchatka south through the Kuril Islands and Sakhalin to Japan, and in Ussuriland in the Russian Far East, and winter from eastern China, Korea, and Japan south to southeastern China, and Taiwan. Subspecies lugens is rare but regular on the western Aleutian Islands—with single confirmed nesting records from Shemya and Attu—and casual on St. Lawrence Island, where birds apparently paired with ocularis have been seen at Gambell on several occasions (Lehman 2005). This subspecies occurs casually during summer on the Alaskan mainland, where a handful of nesting records involve “probable” lugens; a mixed pair—lugens and ocularis—was recorded at Nome in 1973 (Kessel 1989). Other Pacific coast records of lugens come from British Columbia (four spring records), Washington (three spring records), and Oregon (two in fall, one in winter). Particularly remarkable were single adults photographed in coastal North Carolina on 15 May 1982 (AB 36:842) and at St. Pierre, off Newfoundland, 21–26 January 2002 (NAB 56:150).

A few records from eastern North America appear to involve M. a. alba of western Europe and Greenland (e.g., Savard 2002), and two Oregon records may involve M. a. leucopsis of southeastern Russia, eastern China, Korea, Southeast Asia, and small parts of Japan. Adult males recorded in southwestern Oregon on 8 November 1998 and 23 February 1999 were accepted as leucopsis (Nehls 2002), but competing opinion holds that both “appear[ed] to be Black-backed Wagtails” (Marshall et al. 2003). White Wagtails of uncertain subspecies have been reported in Newfoundland (NAB 53:26), North Carolina (NAB 57:44, 141), Arizona (Rosenberg and Witzeman 1999), Washington (three records), Oregon (NAB 60: 430), Baja California Sur (NAB 58:438), and California (six of the records treated here). A White Wagtail of unknown subspecies wintered from November 2005 to 1 March 2006 in Ketchikan, southeastern Alaska (NAB 60:122, 273, 423).

California’s first White Wagtail, a bird of unknown subspecies, was present from 18 to 20 October 1972 at the mouth of the Santa Clara River, Ventura County. The first known occurrence of ocularis is of a first-fall female photographed on 10 October 1974 at Southeast Farallon Island. This record and several others could not be properly evaluated by the CBRC until much later, when Sibley and Howell (1998) published identification criteria for immature ocularis. California claims four fall records of ocularis (5 October–16 November), one involving a bird believed to have returned during successive Octobers (1983 and 1984) at Arroyo de la Cruz, San Luis Obispo County. The state’s three winter records of ocularis (4 November–9 March) include one of a bird present three out of four winters in the Oxnard/Saticoy area, Ventura County. The first bird identified as lugens in California was an alternate-plumaged female detected during the falls of 1979 and 1980 along the Pajaro River near Watsonville, Santa Cruz and Monterey Counties. This bird was seen as early as 20 July (in 1980), thus helping to establish the tendency of lugens to reach California earlier in the fall than does ocularis (Figure 389; note that this apparent pattern could be biased by the small sample sizes or differences in ages or sexes of the birds involved). Out of nine fall occurrences of lugens, some involving multiple occurrences of the same bird, only one was later than 7 October. The exception refers to a first-fall male present on 3 November 1995 at Bolinas, Marin County. Subspecies lugens has twice wintered along the California coast (17 December–12 April), and the four records of spring vagrants (26 April–22 May) are evenly split between coastal and inland sites.

During the period when lugens was accorded species status, records potentially involving this taxon presented the Committee with some of its greatest challenges, mainly because first-fall lugens may be effectively indistinguishable from first-fall male and adult female ocularis (Morlan 1981, Howell 1990, Sibley and Howell 1998, Alström and Mild 2003). As touched upon by Rottenborn and Morlan (2000) and later discussed in some detail by Erickson and Hamilton (2001), the Committee struggled to sort out three confusing records from the border of Monterey and Santa Cruz Counties in 1989, 1990, and 1991. The CBRC ultimately decided to treat them as involving three different birds of uncertain subspecies. Roberson (2002) not only concluded that all three records referred to a single returning individual, he also considered it to be the same bird that the Committee accepted as ocularis under CBRC No. 1988-290! The relevant Committee reports and Roberson (2002) provide further details.

As for so many groups, the criteria for identifying and determining the age of wagtails provided by Pyle (1997b) can be very useful to birders.