Filling in the Gaps

I suspect there won't be many more Cogden walks before the year is out. This morning's short visit was a bit rubbish, with a fairly brisk SW churning up the sea and salting my specs. I found myself checking out the beach and the many weed mats bobbing around offshore more than the bushes or the sky. No Snow Buntings, Grey Phalaropes or Desert Wheatears though; rather a Red-throated Diver E, 13 Lesser Black-backed Gulls W and a single Chiff on the land.

I've been a bit slack with the blog, so this post is an attempt to fill in the many October gaps...

October 5th

9 Chiffs, 2 Firecrests, 2 Spotted Flycatchers and a Jay.

Spotted Flycatcher in a sunny, sheltered corner.

Stonechat

Random Chiffchaff shot that I like, taken late September.

October 6th

28 Chiffs, 1 Blackcap, 3 Firecrests, 2 Goldcrests.

October 7th

13 Chiffs, 1 Firecrest, 1 Jay, 1 Wheatear, 1 Painted Lady.

Fox, context shot.

Easily the biggest fish I've seen a Cogden angler catch - 7lb 14oz Bass.

Interestingly, a few days later I got chatting with another local angler in the Cogden car park, and showed him this photo. Turned out he was a Bass fanatic who has caught a number of double-figure fish. He showed me a photo of an absolutely monstrous Bass he caught at West Bay a couple of years ago. It weighed 16lb 14oz! If I was an awful lot younger I might be tempted to give it a go.

October 10th

10 Chiffs, 5 Blackcaps, an amazing 5 Firecrests, 2 Jays, 1 Coal Tit, 2 Sparrowhawks, 1 Spotted Flycatcher, 1 Redwing, 1 Garden Warbler, 4 Clouded Yellows.

Female Sparrowhawk.

Chiffchaff

Coal Tit

Blackcap

October 11th

32 Chiffs, 2 Blackcaps, 2 Coal Tits, 2 Firecrests, 4 Golden Plovers, 1 Wheatear, 1 Whinchat.

Nice to see my first Golden Plovers of the autumn moving through; a single bird almost over the beach produced a really nice recording.

The Wheatear was an odd one. It looked recently fledged, which seems highly unlikely in mid-October. It stuck around for a few days, so there will be a photo under a later date - today's weren't that great.

Anyway, here's the Golden Plover, plus a nice bit of surf-on-shingle, Skylarks, Meadow Pipits and so on...

Whinchat, with beach behind.

October 12th

Short afternoon visit: 7 Chiffs, 1 Jay, 1 Whinchat.

October 13th

4 Chiffs, 1 Wheatear (same very young-looking bird), 1 Dartford Warbler.

There is an isolated patch of gorse in the middle of a weedy field that I have always fancied for Dartford Warbler. Today I checked it out with exactly that in mind. I almost wasn't surprised when a Dartford Warbler popped up!

The weirdly young-looking Wheatear.

The only time I have seen a Wheatear locally that looked as young as this one was in July, or perhaps very early August I think.

Dartford Warbler

October 14th

An extravagant two-visit day.

Morning: 16 Chiffs, 1 Blackcap, 1 Dartford Warbler (presumably same bird; certainly same spot), 2 Firecrests, 1 Goldcrest, 1 Wheatear (same bird).

Afternoon: 2 Chiffs, 1 Coal Tit, 2 Firecrests, 1 Whinchat.

That Wheatear still...

Common migrant moth, Rush Veneer Nomophila noctuella. Though I haven't seen many this year. In 2022 there were loads in the coastal grassland.

Juvenile Whinchat. The pale blurry specks are little flies. Plenty to eat.

 

October 17th

2 Chiffs, 1 Wheatear (same bird), 1 Kingfisher.

A short morning visit, which was pretty dire really...and then a Kingfisher zipped past me, heading inland along a hedge line! And no, I have never seen a Kingfisher at Cogden before.

October 18th

2 Chiffs, 1 Firecrest.

In the absence of any other photos from this very quiet morning visit, have another Firecrest pic...

Firecrest

The October Firecrest tally is currently 19 bird-days, which is tons better than I've ever managed in a whole year I reckon.

October 20th - West Bay

A departure from the Cogden routine as storm Ashley gave us a bit of seawatching weather. We didn't get the brunt of it, and it was probably a bit too short-lived to displace birds in a big way. Still, there were a few bits to look at...

205 Gannets, 126 Med Gulls, 8 Kittiwakes, 3 Common Scoter, 1 Brent Goose, 1 Great Northern Diver, 1 Common/Arctic Tern, 1 unidentified skua.

I hope I never get bored of Med Gulls flying by. They are such a smart gull. The skua was probably a juv Arctic, but looked rather pale and slender, giving me Long-tailed vibes. But it wasn't in the slightest bit hesitant or dithery, so I was no doubt getting excited over nothing. Which actually is what you're supposed to do when seawatching.

Adult Med Gull flies past the West Bay shelter in the early-morning murk.

The River Brit overflowing into the field behind Rise Restaurant, West Bay. Several gulls dotted about, sadly nothing special.

Med Gulls and BHGs in the flooded field inland of Rise Restaurant, West Bay.

October 27th

1 Chiff, 1 Black Redstart, 3 Common Scoters, 2 Dartford Warblers, 1 Goldcrest, 1 Merlin, 1 Redwing.

A lively morning with lots happening. The 2 Dartfords were in the same gorse patch occupied by a single bird two weeks ago. Who knows whether or not they are both new birds? The Black Redstart had clearly just arrived, landing briefly on top of a hedge before heading away inland. The Merlin went straight through W. The sky was busy with Woodpigeons and Jackdaws, as well as Skylarks, Meadow Pipits, Chaffinches and so on.

Vis-mig Jackdaws. In the distance are the chalk cliffs of Beer Head, East Devon.

Another sizeable flock of Jackdaws through, with a few Woodpigeons.

Merlin

Three drake Common Scoters.

Meadow Pipit on the Dartford Warbler gorse.

One of the Dartford Warblers shows briefly in the sunshine.

Dartford Warbler. Photographically speaking, not cooperative.

So that's it. All the October gaps filled and the blog up to date. Tomorrow we have our granddaughters for the day. Cogden is out, but Seaton Wetlands is child friendly...

It's a rarity, Jim, but not as we know it...

This afternoon was calm and overcast. I could picture the sallows and sycamores of Cogden, small and interesting warblers flitting through their limp foliage, easy to spot...

Yeah, right. The initial vibe was dead, dead, dead. And thinking about it logically, surely the whole place had been completely blown out by yesterday's hoolie? Hmm. Yes, probably. Ah well, perhaps a few habitat photos then...

The view downhill across a typical Cogden field (no public access to this one) with a typical Cogden hedgerow, leading to the coast path and some typical Cogden shingle.

Sensing birdlessness, I decided to count Stonechats. At least it would make me search properly, do a bit of scanning and so on. If there was a Siberian Stonechat here, I was not going to overlook it.

I am so not a purposeful birdwatcher. My entire focus this afternoon was to see what I could dig out. Even the carefully noted Stonechat tally of 22 had an ulterior motive. As predicted, the sallows and sycamores were indeed still, but absolutely zero warblers were flitting through their limp foliage. A handful of thrushes burst from adjacent hedgerows as I plodded along. Blackbirds, Song Thrushes, uncounted. No Ring Ouzels. Ooh, is that a warbler?

No, it was a Firecrest. Distant and brief, no photo.

Another field, another hedge. The Firecrest was just along there on the right...

Carefully I worked the whole seaward edge of the Othona compound, with its tall pines and sycamores. Limp foliage city. But dead. Not even a Chiff.

Eventually I was down on the coast path...

The inner coast path, looking E towards the boardwalk sallows.

A bit of patience here paid off. Another Firecrest and at least three Goldcrests...

This afternoon's Firecrests were not cooperative.

This Goldcrest was less coy.

While I was manoeuvring into position for some more Goldcrest pics, and enjoying a bit of late-afternoon sunshine, I kicked a small moth out of the weedy grass. Flip! Look at that! I knew it was rare. I'd seen it on social media recently, but couldn't remember the name. Thankfully it let me get reasonably close...

Banded Sable Spoladea recurvalis - a scarce migrant from the tropics.

Eventually it flew into tall bramble, out of reach. I'm not sure exactly how many Dorset records there are, but it looks like less than 30. If it was a bird, in a county context we are talking something a lot rarer than the Barred Warbler I found at West Bay a couple of autumns back, and in a completely different league to the Yellow-browed Warbler I keep hoping for currently. Brilliant.

That fired me right up. From this point on, every bit of rank, weedy vegetation got a good kicking. Quickly I added Rusty-dot Pearl to the moth list, another migrant but common. However, that was it. Despite a lot of effort, and deliberate detours through likely-looking habbo, I did not see another moth.

Have I peaked, I wonder? Is this jammy encounter going to be the rarity highlight of my autumn? I sense irony.

An arty habitat shot to close...

The Cogden reedbed is a spectacular spidery metropolis.

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.