New Bird Sighted Following Mistaken Identity

New Jersey has a new celebrity -- a broad-tailed hummingbird, a species that until recently had never before been sighted by birders in the Garden State.

The bird has been spending the winter in teacher Garr Kerr's front yard in Lower Township, just a couple of miles away from the Cape May Bird Observatory.

Experts from the observatory had seen it months ago but mistook it for a more common species. Only this month did a birder's new photograph confirm it was the broad-tailed hummingbird, a western species never before documented in New Jersey. Birders have been heading to Kerr's neighborhood to catch sight of the unusual visitor.

Cape May Bird Observatory director Mike Crewe tells The Press of Atlantic City the hummingbird could stick
around until April before heading west.
(Copyright 2012 by The Associated Press.  All Rights Reserved.)