The Fire-capped Prince

Cogden has been amazingly good for Firecrests lately. A total of 16 bird-days for me in the first two weeks of October, and a surprising peak count of five. A few have been cooperative enough to allow photos. So this post is just an excuse to trot out my favourite recent Firecrest pics, all taken this month; it has no other purpose whatsoever.

Incidentally, the scientific name for Firecrest - Regulus ignicapillus - apparently means fire-capped (literally, fire-haired) prince. Appropriate.

Back in Gull Scool

As long suffering NQS readers know, I do like a Caspian Gull. Like any other of the so-called large white-headed gulls, Casp is a variable beast. However, they hardly come more classic-looking than the lovely example with which Cogden blessed me a few weeks ago. Life would be a lot easier if they all looked like that. But they don't. In my limited experience, yer classic Casp is very much in the minority. Most of the 1cy (first calendar-year) and 1st-winter birds I've seen have warranted fewer descriptive superlatives than that one received. Which brings me to the flooded field behind Rise Restaurant at West Bay, around 09:00 on 30th September.

Picking up the story where the previous post left it, this is what I was looking at...

One of the first photos I took, full frame at 2000mm zoom. It's the bird in the middle, in profile.

Three minutes later it flew left, out of the flock, landing alone. It then peered around for about 90 seconds, then lifted off and departed. It had been present for around five minutes in total. Apart from my initial brief scope view before it joined the flock, I had concentrated on getting photos. Here are the best of them...

This bird reminded me very much of an ugly-duckling Axe Estuary Casp from December 2019. That one had been ringed as a Caspian Gull in a mixed gull colony in eastern Germany which does produce hybrids, but for a number of reasons I was happy enough to call it a Caspian Gull. Those reasons were...

• A Caspian Gull ID paper published in British Birds (December 2011: BB 104 pp.702-742) proposed a scoring system that could be used to separate Caspian Gulls from look-alike hybrids, and the Axe bird comfortably passed that test.
• A few London-based gull enthusiasts gave it the thumbs-up.
• To my eye it had 'the look', that subjective, indefinable something that puts me in a happy place. In other words I felt quite comfortable calling it a Caspian Gull.

Here is the bird in question...

German-ringed Casp with 1st-winter Herring Gull 18/12/2019

Hopefully it is obvious why the West Bay bird reminded me so much of this one.

The mucky underparts on the Axe bird definitely caused reservations at the time, for me and for others, but there would have been none at all had it been cleaner below. A few weeks later, another Casp appeared on the Axe. Lovely white head, much cleaner underparts, but the chunky bill (with obvious gonys) and rather dark, heavily-marked scapulars were less than ideal really. Still, BirdGuides liked it, and published a photo in their monthly summary. As I said, not all Casps are classics...

The West Bay gull (above) compared with a couple of vintage Axe Casps. Incidentally, both those birds scored almost exactly the same according to the BB paper parameters: 19 and 18 respectively, where 18 is the mean for Caspian Gull and 21 is the safe upper limit; 22 or higher could be a hybrid.

So, here is a pic of the West Bay gull with annotations galore...

Also, just to illustrate how different this bird is to standard Herring Gulls of the same age...

Gull folk always like to see the underwing of a 1cy Casp, and 'the paler, the better' is basically what we're looking for. So here is the West Bay bird in comparison with the two Axe Casps...

The 7/1/20 Casp clearly - and unsurprisingly - has the palest underwing. Nice.

However, we shouldn't get too hung up on the underwing thing. The collage below is from the BB paper...

Page 734 of British Birds vol. 104. We need to stop worrying about dirty underwings.

One final thing. According to the aforementioned ID paper by Gibbins et al, another useful metric in Casp ID is bill shape, specifically the ratio of length to depth. A Caspian Gull will ideally have a nice, slender bill anyway, without a prominent gonys, but actually calculating the length:depth ratio by the method outlined in the paper will give you a nice bit of data to play with too. So I did.

The following photo is probably the best profile shot. I cropped it massively so that the head nearly filled a sheet of A4, then printed it out and measured the bill. The length:depth ratio was a touch over 2.5.

Probably the best profile shot.

So there we go, even the bill shape falls comfortably within range for Casp. In fact it is very close to the mean, and outside the standard deviation of both Herring Gull and hybrids.

Conclusion

The only thing I haven't done is run this bird through the trait scoring process that I used on the Axe birds. Mainly that was because my photos probably are not good enough to comprehensively cover all the features that need close examination. But also because I had already made up my mind about this bird.

Without doubt it has a ton of pro-Casp features. However, I think the photos of it alone out on the grass finally killed it for me. In the 13 years since the publication of that ID paper Caspian Gull has expanded well into Western Europe, breeding in mixed colonies among Herring and Yellow-legged Gulls. None of these so-called species is particularly good at telling which is which, and the resultant genetic cocktails are legion. The West Bay bird may be a pure Casp, but I highly doubt it. Perhaps it is some subtle head-shape thing, but the bird simply doesn't have 'the look'. So I'm not counting it as one.

Personally I reckon a lot of birds that are published as Caspian Gulls are not quite the full ticket, and that probably includes a percentage of mine. But who cares? Not me. When there are stonkers like that recent Cogden bird out there, gulls will always be worth checking.

Frustrations

This morning's walk at Cogden followed neatly in the theme set by almost every other birding effort in the last week or so: frustration. My eye was drawn to some movement on the outside of a sallow clump. Two Chiffs probably. The first bird quickly showed well. Yep, Chiff. Then the second bird emerged. Ooh, hello! That's got to be a Sibe Chiff! Not close, but it had that lovely pallid look. Absolutely bang on for tristis. It stayed in view long enough to let me extract the camera and zoom in, and then, just as I tweaked the focus to perfection...gone! I didn't see where it went, and never saw it again. Massively unsatisfying. I almost left it as a 'probable' but I'm sure it was one, and in view of the week's other frustrations I'm having it! Today's bird is the first local Sibe Chiff I've seen somewhere other than a sewage works, so a pretty cool record actually.

The morning tally was 21 Chiffs, 3 Blackcaps, 2 Lesser Black-backed Gulls and a heard-only Ringed Plover. Plenty of hirundines and other passage overhead kept things lively, but nothing of special note caught my eye or ear.

Admittedly, yesterday morning's Cogden visit was frustration free. Standard fare in the shape of 23 Chiffs, 2 Blackcaps and 3 Wheatears was spiced up by the appearance of my third Firecrest of the autumn, as well as a Peregrine and 4 Jays. Jays seem conspicuous right now, and these four were clearly on the move together.

Peregrine silhouetted on the crown of the beach.

I never tire of these. Firecrest, mostly in shadow but its head catching the early-morning sun.

Back to Sunday now...

Very blowy. Seawatching was the obvious option. A morning effort produced 2 Arctic Skuas, 9 Balearic Shearwaters, 14 Common Scoters and 24 Med Gulls. Sounds pretty good, right? Except all the quality birds were way too far out to enjoy properly. Oh, and even further out was the tantalising shape of a large shearwater sp. that lifted above the horizon time and time again as it sheared its way purposefully east, way beyond my reach. I could do absolutely nothing with it. Frustration.

By late afternoon it was blowing a SSE hoolie and tanking down. I supposed little would actually be on the move in this but tried anyway, hoping for something storm-driven. On my radar were Leach's Petrel and Grey Phalarope. Limited visibility made the scope superfluous I reckoned, and so left it in the car. Unbelievably my first scan with bins revealed a small, dark-winged bird fluttering in a trough, struggling to make headway against the wind. Surprisingly not a Leach's, but size-wise pretty close. The penny dropped. A Black Tern, surely? It was a bit distant, and close to the edge of the murk, and I cursed myself for leaving the scope in the car. Desperate measures then - what about a bit of video? By the time I had the camera ready it had vanished.

So it went down as 'probable Black Tern' which is basically the same as saying 'bird I can't count' and a complete waste of typing effort. I haven't seen a local Black Tern since 2008. Yep, rocking horse poo.

Anyway, the rest of the seawatch was notable only for the spectacularly rough and empty sea. Four Ringed Plovers whisked in like leaves in a gale and sought shelter on the beach in front of me. There was very little of it to shelter on, just a strip of shingle below the sea wall. By standing on the seat and leaning forward as far as I dared, I could just about see one of them...

Bedraggled Ringed Plover sheltering on the West Bay shingle. The fuzzy blur at the bottom of the frame is the top edge of the sea wall.

Close to high tide in a SSE gale. Leach's Petrel by the red post would have been nice. It's happened before.

Yep, it was very rough.

By Monday morning the wind was forecast to swing to the west. It did, and was predictably rubbish. I did try, but 9 Common Scoters, 2 Common/Arctic Terns and a single Kittiwake was pitiful really. Still, a night of heavy rain had left the field behind Rise Restaurant very soggy, and there were some gulls. I decided to give them fifteen minutes. One scan revealed the complete absence of anything interesting, and I spent the next 14 minutes hoping something might drop in. Not much did, and I collapsed my scope. One final scan...

Hello, what's this? A very striking, white-headed gull with two obvious wing-bars and beautifully Casp-ish coverts had just arrived. Scope up, and...

It immediately flew to the small flock nearby, right at the back of them. Almost hidden...

Object of interest.

The gull deserves a post of its own, and will get one. All I can say is: a load more frustration.

Record Shot Mentality

In recent years a camera has become almost as indispensable a piece of birding kit as my bins. The difference that a modest superzoom can make to the level of pleasure I get from a typical short session in the field is out of all proportion to any inconvenience connected with lugging it about. Even so, some may wonder if having a photographic record of birds you see is that big a deal. For me it is, yes. Why? My bird (and other nat. hist.) pics serve a number of purposes. Blog illustration for one. ID confirmation sometimes. So, a couple of practical reasons right there. Also, the immense pleasure to be derived from browsing through your old birdy pics on a rainy afternoon like this one is only possible if you have some.

Very few of my bird photos look like this...

Spotted Flycatcher photographed at Cogden on 14th September.

Generally I do not get frame fillers like the above. That's okay by me because mostly I much prefer a nice context shot, with the bird a relatively small part of the image. Though sometimes I do take it to extremes...

Two Ringed Plovers (bottom left) on Cogden Beach. In the background top right is the wooden chalet at Eype Mouth that featured as the murder location in Broadchurch series one. It is well over 4 miles away.

That was Monday morning. Birds as follows: 6 Chiffs, 1 Blackcap, 4 Wheatears, 1 Whinchat, 12 Teal W, and the 2 Ringed Plovers. Hardly bursting with activity. Which is probably why I took this photo...

Very much a record shot: Whinchat.

One other function of the camera came into play that morning: scope substitute. Way up the beach was a small group of gulls and Cormorants. Through bins a couple of the gulls had that white-headed look of a young Casp - though I was 99% sure they were Great Black-backs, and they were - but was that a Goosander sitting on the beach too? Surely not?! No, it wasn't. But I took a photo anyway, so that I could peruse it at leisure...

A hefty crop tells me all I wanted to know. Though I hadn't noticed the Herring Gull wrestling with an eel bottom right, and binoculars would never have bagged that sinensis 'Continental' Cormorant (arrowed). Value!

Yesterday afternoon I had a short walk at Cogden after work. Mainly I stuck to an area that doesn't get looked at much. Apart from a constant stream of hirundines passing west, absolutely nothing of note. So instead of birds, a couple of scenic shots...

Taken from almost the top northwest corner of Cogden, looking east. The Burton Mere reedbed just behind the beach top left. Houses at West Bexington in the distance. Shows the Cogden habitat well. Not all of it is accessible though.

Same viewpoint, looking directly along the coast. Burton Mere reedbed and fat end of Portland top right; trees surrounding Othona property on the coast road top left. A ton of very desirable habitat.

The first time I've tried the 'panorama' function on the camera. Not sure whether it was worth the bother though. Trees far right are just outside the western boundary of Cogden recording area.

This morning I had time for a quick, mid-morning visit to Cogden. Within 15 minutes I'd bagged 4 Yellow Wagtails, a Redstart and a Firecrest. The Yellow Wags were the first I've seen this autumn. The Redstart was also my first this autumn, as well as the first autumn bird anywhere in the West Bex/Cogden recording area apart from a random late-July male. The Firecrest was my second. In short, I thought I had jammed in on a fall of some kind, and was about to fill my boots. Wrong. Apart from a few Chiffs and Blackcaps, and a lone Wheatear, that was it. Record shots as follows...

Yellow Wagtail. As record shots go, this is quite a good one...

...while this one is very much worthy of the name. Blurry Redstart. I never saw it again.

Finally, the Firecrest. On occasion my photography skills desert me entirely, and I end up getting an utterly hopeless image. But even then it is sometimes possible to rescue the situation and extract the delightfully awful record shot that posterity requires...

How it started. Firecrest, as it looked straight off the camera.

How it ended up.

Sun & Rain

Not all coast is equal. Certainly it is a blessing to have a beautiful stretch of the West Dorset coast at my disposal, but it is no good expecting it to produce even a fraction of the birds making landfall in, say, Yorkshire right now. True enough, reading about the Red-breasted Flycatchers, Barred Warblers and hatfuls of Yellow-browed currently entertaining East Coast birders is motivating, but 20+ years of experience here has ensured I remain a realist. In that time I have seen one each of the first two species, and just a handful of the third. Of course, that doesn't stop me trying.

Yesterday afternoon was gorgeous. Sunny, warm, a moderate SE breeze. Around 3pm I arrived at Cogden, intending to work as much of the sheltered hedge lines as I reasonably could. Three hours later the tally was 28 Chiffs, 3 Blackcaps, 1 Whitethroat, 1 Skylark, 3 Clouded Yellows, 4 Painted Ladies and a Small Tortoiseshell.

Chiffchaff in a sunny, autumnal hedge.

Chiffchaff again.

The habitat looks awesome, and just walking though it is a pleasure...

Heading east. Lots of butterflies in the flower-rich meadows.

Enjoyable though it was, apart from that modest count of Chiffs there wasn't a lot to show for three hours. However, the weather was forecast to deteriorate overnight, with heavy rain moving in from the south. Might that result in a few birds dropping in?

Frankly the rain first thing was a bit too uncompromising for my taste, so I waited for it to ease a little and arrived around 08:00. One very soggy walk later the tally was 42 Chiffs, 8 Blackcaps, 6 Whitethroats, and singles of Lesser Whitethroat and Reed Warbler. And on the beach were 12 Wheatears and 5 Ringed Plovers. So, though numbers were up a bit, on the passerine front it was more or less a case of 'as you were'. No cherry.

And then, working my way up the final hedge I spied a small bird flying along it towards me. In flight I could see it was a Firecrest, which then proceeded to plonk down right in front of me. Yay!

Uncropped, shortly after arrival. Spot the Firecrest.

At this point the rain was merely spitting, so I spent some time trying to get a photo...

I am a big fan of Firecrests anyway, but even more so when they are as obliging as this one. Funny, isn't it? Just that one tiny bird elevated the morning's birding to another level.

Well worth getting soaked for.