When I photographed this hummingbird Merlin (the gold standard of bird identification apps) told me it was a White-Eared Hummingbird.  So I submitted it to eBird (the gold standard app for reporting bird sightings) as a White-Eared Hummingbird.  But the eBird people got back to me and said, no, it wasn’t a White-Eared Hummingbird, it’s a White-Eared x Broad-Tailed Hummingbird, a new hybrid they had started to see recently at Ash Canyon.

The hybrid paring was so new eBird didn’t have it listed in its database yet. I had to wait from July until October for  the name to show up in eBird so I could properly identify it.  So when I took this photo, this hummingbird was literally a bird with no name. It was exciting to photograph a bird whose name did not yet officially exist!