A Careless Birder

I took these photos of this pale crane on the last day at Izumi. It was feeding among the other thousands Hooded Cranes at the Crane Observation Center. I noticed that it has an unusual pale brownish-grey plumage, different from other juvenile Hooded Cranes, but I thought it might be some kind of variants. Until today, I just discovered that it was not a variant juvenile Hooded, but it was a typical juvenile Common Crane.

The bird tended to keep concentrating on feeding all the time, so I could only get few photos of it. It was not easy photographing one individual among this tight group of Hooded Cranes. The bird seemed to be the same size, and shared the same pattern with juvenile Hooded Crane, but just paler. That's why I didn't think of it being another species. But later, today I looked carefully at these photos, I noticed that it has some black feathers growing up on its throat, coincided with just having seen a picture of a juvenile Common Crane, I finally realised how careless I was. In conclusion, I'm a careless birder that have seen 3 Common Cranes in Arasaki, not 2.

The bird already had some black on throat, indicating that it's not a Hooded

I should've been more rigorous!