Do You Know What This Is?

This afternoon, we had a visitor to our yard. He was a handsome fellow and not terribly shy. We first saw him when he landed on our porch railing. He sat looking at us for a while and then flew over to one of the flower beds where he sat motionless for quite some time. I was able to get fairly close to get a picture without scaring him away. We were concerned that he might be sick or injured.


Although it's difficult to tell in this picture (my camera's focus hasn't been working well), his feathers were fluffy leading us to believe he was still a baby. He was much larger than other baby birds we've had in the yard, larger even than some adult birds. We're quite curious to find out what type of bird he is because we've never seen another like him.

He was still in the flower bed when we went in the house for lunch, but he was gone when we came back out. Sadly, we found him dead on our porch some time later. He had found a spot behind our bar and quietly passed away. My guess is that he had lost his mother and was unable to fend for himself.

I would still like to identify him. I've looked at pictures of dozens of birds that are native to Michigan and I can't find any that look quite like him. He resembled a robin, but he was larger than a typical adult robin and he had very long tail feathers, almost hawk-like. Do you know what he is?