go home, your excellency, or at least get lucky

IBET, the Illinois birding email list, alerted us to the presence of an ORANGE BISHOP at Montrose Beach. It was there all right. All the way from Africa maybe? No, all the way from some moron who released it from its cage. Since it’s almost certainly an escape, we can’t claim it as a lifer, bitchin’ as it was. Apparently, the same poor fella showed up the last year or two, but he’s just a cipher in the birding community until he hooks up with some of his kind and starts a breeding flock. But what do we care if he counts? We’ve got the His Eminence the Northern Cardinal who is just as bitchin’ and outranks our foreign ecclesiastic to boot.