And in Gull Class Today...

This post is in response to a query regarding yesterday's Caspian Gull. Basically, how did I identify it? So I'll try and go through the process, and hopefully there will be some useful tips for anyone who's interested.

If I've done the sums right, yesterday's Casp is my 17th ever. Following a 2nd-winter on the West Bexington Mere back in January, it is my second in Dorset; all the others were on the Axe Estuary, Seaton. I personally found 13 of them, or 14 if you count one which I later learned had been seen a day or two earlier. I actively look for Caspian Gulls, regularly picking through crowds of large gulls for the tell-tale field marks which identify them. I found my first in 2009, but I'd been searching for a couple of years prior to that, so we're talking roughly 13 years in total. In other words, I've found about one a year on average. Mind you, last winter I found four, but at this stage I'm not sure what to put that down to. Are they becoming less scarce in the southwest? Or was I just exceptionally jammy? Or perhaps there are sometimes 'good years' for them? Who knows? Time will tell I guess...

Meanwhile, think of them as a very scarce bird and you can't go wrong. Search for them, by all means, but don't view failure to find one as some big deal. They are genuinely scarce down here, bordering on rare.

So, when it comes to my seemingly self-appointed role as Caspian Gull ID Guru, what are my qualifications? Please reread paragraph two. Yep, very scanty. I am no guru. How it works is this:

1. Read up a bit
2. Go out and look at gulls
3. Repeat steps 1 and 2 ad infinitum, especially step 2
   

And that's it. I could increase my field experience of the species by regularly travelling to some of the country's Casp hotspots, but I'm not prepared to do that, hence only 17 birds. Mind you, that's not a bad tally for local birding in Devon and Dorset. So anyway, down to business...

How come I got so excited, so quickly, on seeing yesterday's bird?

It was with Great Black-backed Gulls, including several juveniles, and I simply began to check all the juvs to make sure they were actually GBBGs. The first one I looked at clearly wasn't! How did I know? Its scapulars were too pale. And even through bins alone, at considerable range, I could see it had two pale wing bars and a line of plain, dark-based greater coverts, a really good pointer for 1st-winter Casp and a combo that I have yet to see on a Herring Gull. So here's a photo of the 1st-winter Caspian Gull with a Herring Gull and GBBG of the same age. Have a look, and pick out those obvious differences.

Front to back, we have 1st-winter Casp, HG and GBBG

All this talk of coverts and scapulars might be a bit confusing, so here's a photo with assorted useful bits labelled...

In the next photo the bird is mid-preen, so its wing is untucked and relaxed, with the feather tracts really obvious. Incidentally, note pale areas beginning to come through on the bill. Typical of Casp.

Have another look at those greater coverts. Now remind yourself what a typical Herring Gull looks like (top photo again). Chalk. Cheese. Also check out the blackish tertials, and see how the pale markings are restricted to neat tips only, without any pale notches further down the edge of the feathers. Again, compare with HG. Note also the relatively long tibia. When it walks about there is a slightly comical 'on stilts' effect, especially in a strong wind!

One more pic with arrows...

When juv Caspian Gulls moult into 1st-winter plumage, one of the most obvious changes is seen in the scapular feathers, and the same is true of Herring and Yellow-legged Gulls. The plain brown juvenile feathers are replaced by patterned grey ones. October 5th is my earliest date for a Casp, and you can see that yesterday's bird still has a few juv lower scaps, a feature shared by my only other October bird of this age. A typical 2nd-generation feather will be pale (or pale-ish) grey, often with a dark diamond at the base, a thin dark line down the centre, and a fine anchor-shaped mark near the tip. A few like that are visible in the photo. Herring Gull (and Yellow-legged Gull) scaps are typically much more heavily marked, appearing darker overall.

Unlike the scapulars, almost all the wing feathers are retained throughout the winter. In other words, they are juvenile feathers, which gradually become more and more worn in appearance. Yesterday's bird appears to have moulted an inner greater covert, and replaced it with a grey, 2nd-generation feather. I'm not sure that I've ever seen that before.

One more preening photo. Note the light streaking on the crown. That will soon wear away I reckon, leaving us with the classic white-headed vision of loveliness for which I am constantly on the lookout during the winter months.

See that grey inner greater covert? I resisted pointing at it with a big yellow arrow.

And here is the only flight shot worth a look. Pale underwing = good. Very contrasty tail with neat black band = good. Blur and missing parts of bird = bad.

In a nutshell, with this bird the closed-wing pattern nailed it. It has many other excellent pro-Caspian features (several mentioned above) but this individual has such a classic set of wing coverts that identification was almost instant. Not all Casps are quite as straightforward.

As I implied at the beginning, words on a page (like the above) are all very well, but there is no substitute for looking at gulls in the field. As often as possible. Relate what you see with what you've read, and gradually it falls into place. It's one of those things where you get out what you put in.

All the best with it!

Disclaimer: there may be errors in the above. My wine glass is empty.

Icing On the Cake

There are a lot of very desirable birds about at the moment. Though not a student of these things, I'm pretty sure this autumn must already be exceptional, rarity-wise. And yet I am not tempted to travel and see any. Not the slightest bit. I am not jealous, not even envious. I do not wish I lived somewhere else right now, nor that I was having a nice holiday there. I am perfectly content as I am. In fact, the glut of good birds elsewhere just whets my appetite for getting out locally. I'm not making some moral point here, simply demonstrating that I'm easily pleased I suppose.

This morning I walked around the Cogden Beach area for a couple of hours from dawn. I passed one dog walker and saw a few others from a distance. Late this afternoon, a yomp from West to East Bexington and back. Again, I passed just a lone dog walker, and saw a handful of other folk from a distance. A few hours in the field, and virtually no one about. Certainly no birders. That, to me, is almost the perfect birding scenario. Factor in that we're talking gorgeous coastal habbo, and then it pretty much is perfect.

Grounded migrants at Cogden were few. I counted 7 Wheatears on the beach (cf 17 on Saturday) and just 2 Chiffs and a Blackcap in the bushes. Overhead, Skylarks were prominent, with around 70, but nothing else of particular note. A Water Rail called repeatedly from the reed bed, and I was glad I had the recorder running. I was also glad I could get a phone signal, because at 08:30 Mike called to let me know that 2 Whooper Swans were heading my way from West Bex. Presumably the birds which had recently spent some time at Abbotsbury Swannery, they came past with a tag-along Mute Swan. Just as I was firing off a final burst with the camera, one of them honked a couple of times. Excellent! A bit distant, and partially drowned by surf on shingle, but the recorder caught it...

Whooper Swans. Proper wild ones. Lovely.

If I kept such things as a local list or a Dorset list I'd have had a tick right there. But I don't and therefore didn't. They very much made my morning though. That's three times in just over three weeks that Mike has phoned from West Bex to get me on to birds heading west towards Cogden: 17 pale-bellied Brents, 2 Great White Egrets and now these. It's about time I returned the favour; I'm beginning to feel like a freeloader!

Late this afternoon I managed another outing. My intention was an uncharacteristic bit of 'fast' birding, a rapid march from West Bexington to the East Bexington tamarisks, and back before dinner. It's a while since I've been quite that far, and time was tight. Actually it was blowing a bit of a hoolie, and visions of an East Bex Yellow-browed Warbler flicking through the whispy fronds began to fade somewhat. Ah well, let's push on anyway...

There are several ploughed fields at East Bexington, and one of them held some gulls. Not loads, but a modest gang of small ones, and a separate, even smaller bunch of big ones. Almost all the big gulls were Great Black-backed, maybe 30 or so. Now, this might sound silly, but in my limited (and 100% local) experience of Caspian Gull, the brutish, hulking Great Black-backed Gull has for some curious reason turned out to be a bit of a 'carrier' species, so straight away I began to grill all the youngsters. And would you believe it, the very first one I checked was a Caspian Gull! And not any old Caspian Gull, but an absolute peach, with a set of coverts to die for...

The icing on the cake. One stonking juv/first-winter Caspian Gull

The gulls weren't close, and I was lying on a grassy embankment, trying to keep the camera steady at full 2000mm zoom in the strong wind. I took quite a few pics, but failed to get any decent open-wing shots, and the one time it flew I botched it. But there is this little video. With the volume up, you too can enjoy the rather fresh north-westerly...

This bird is actually a good one for highlighting some useful Casp ID tips. Initially I planned to do so today, but time is against me, so instead I'll cobble together one or two annotated photos for another post, hopefully this week. Birders in this part of the country stand a pretty decent chance of finding their own Caspian Gull I reckon, but you need to be aware of what to look for. Also they are still rare enough down here that you get a real buzz when it happens! I love 'em!

I never made it to the tamarisks...

The Hackneyed Cliché

You've got to be in it to win it!

Definitely one of my least favourite clichés. Unfortunately it is also a tedious truism, and as I lounged, partially embedded in my comfy sofa at lunchtime, peering out at the greyness and teeming rain, it sprang annoyingly to mind. Because indeed, you have got to be in it to win it...

My Twitter feed, like that of every other birder who uses this form of social media, is rigid with rareness, most of it on the east coast or northern isles. Mix that with amazing numbers of Yellow-browed Warblers and many other even scarcer birds, and you have a potion that ought to galvanise even the laziest birder into action. Except that West Dorset is not East Yorkshire. Still, we are blessed locally with some marvellous habitat and a gorgeous bit of coast, and of course you never know...you never know...

This was exactly my thinking yesterday afternoon too. I wasn't able to get out till quite late, but the rain largely bypassed me, so I was able to tramp the Cogden paths with no more than soggy boots to show for it. However, it was a fair old bit of graft for a tally of 5 Chiffchaffs and 3 Blackcaps! I'm not complaining though, because there were birds all over the place. Little groups of Meadow Pipits flicking about, the constant dipping and twisting of hirundines - mainly House Martins - in the lea of the coast road ridge. I thoroughly enjoyed myself. It's just that there were no particular highlights.

Which brings me to today. I was busy this morning, but after lunch there was nothing to stop me heading out the door and giving Cogden another bash. Nothing, that is, except my own inertia. It was raining. It was dank and gloomy. Yuck.

But. You've got to be in it to win it!

The hackneyed cliché. The tedious truism. I gathered waterproofs, retrieved wellies from the garage, and headed out...

And within five minutes I accidentally flushed a Short-eared Owl! Ha! Interestingly it was a spot I'd always fancied for the species, and here it finally was, my first Dorset SEO. It headed away east, over a hedge and out of view. It dropped low enough to make me suspect that it wasn't going far. Meanwhile I continued in the opposite direction. Five minutes later and there was another! This one was airborne already, and landed some distance away. I wondered briefly whether it was actually bird number one doubling back past me, but I don't think so.

And then I cocked up. I tried to skirt around well above where it had come down so as not to disturb it, but from a distance had completely misjudged the spot and inadvertantly put it up. Stupid. It went east, and again, seemingly not far. But I felt like an idiot...

Short-eared Owl

The originals were badly underexposed. These have been subjected to brutal processing to get something presentable.

Down to the beach then, which I hadn't had time for yesterday.

Straight away there were Wheatears. By the time I cut inland for the return leg I'd counted 17, plus 2 Whinchats. My first double-figure count since August. Clearly something was happening today.

I got the camera wet more often than I probably should have...

Damp Wheatear.

And another. Some of the Wheatears were a lot more bedraggled than this.

I couldn't get anywhere near the Whinchats, which were together, but met them both again on the inland coast path as I headed back. They were still mighty skittish though...

Whinchat. Distant, appalling light, wind in my face, rain tanking down (quite obvious in the photo), so I really shouldn't have bothered. Just can't help myself...

That was pretty much it. I added 2 Chiffs and 5 Blackcaps before I got back to the car park, at which point I noticed how wet I was. Soaked. Plus I had been plagued all the way round by a rogue sock. For some reason my left sock kept working its way down my ankle until it was all scrunched up beneath the arch of my foot. Whereupon it was welly off, pull up sock, welly on, and away we go...only to find myself tutting with annoyance within minutes, and going through the whole saga again. I think the problem is an old-man thing. My boot socks are elderly, but there is plenty of life in them yet. The elastic is knackered, yes, but they aren't worn out. Basically they work okay. They do. So why throw them out?

Even as I type I can sense the rolling of eyes. Like Sandra's did when I recounted this tale of woe.

Anyway, I'll close with a photo taken yesterday, in a brief bit of sunshine...

Chiffchaff.

Just a smart little Chiffchaff, but maybe a Yellow-browed Warbler one day soon...?

You've got to be in it to win it!

Again?

Slightly less than one year ago I wrote a post entitled 'My Happy Bird', following a visit to Cogden that involved a Lapland Bunting. That post rekindled what had been a very quiet blog. At the same time, something else happened. I rediscovered birding. It is hard to convey in words exactly what this has meant to me without sounding a bit melodramatic, so I shan't even try. Suffice to say that I'm pleased it happened, and that the subsequent twelve months have been a blast.

October is here now. Hard to believe that just five minutes ago I was lusting after a skua-laden helping of spring seawatching. And that four-and-three-quarter minutes ago Covid-19 arrived, and suddenly there was no spring seawatching. There was #BWKM0 though, and there was nocmig, and there was a whole heap of other birding possibilities which we had not foreseen. It has all been very surprising. So the lesson I have drawn from the last year is not to be surprised by the surprising. Which is just as well, because otherwise I would have been very surprised this morning...

Recent outings had been uneventful, with often a rather thin sprinkling of grounded migrants, so when I arrived at Cogden just before sunrise and immediately had 2 Chiffs by the car park, and heard a small chorus of ticking Robins and chucking Blackbirds, I sensed birdiness. For a change I went straight to the beach and walked east into the sun. Suddenly a Wheatear was right in front of me, just feet away and not flushing...

Beach Wheatear. Just minor cropping at 300mm zoom. I love that backlighting.

And from the sunny side. That early morning light is so warm...

Four Wheatears in total - more than I've seen on the beach for ages. It all felt very promising. Periodically I would stop and have a scan. A slow sweep of the sea, or a distant hedgerow that was too far for the naked eye to be much use. Doing this I spied a bird on a fence post. The fence itself bordered the inland side of the coast path, viewed from the beach right across the far side of the Burton Mere reedbed. In fact it was too distant to be 100% identifiable with bins. However, my gut was telling me it looked really good for a Wryneck (which I knew was basically not possible because two Wrynecks in three weeks would be too jammy, even for me) and that I had better hurry up and get the camera out. Two shots at 2000mm full zoom, a quick peek at the results...enlarge a bit...and...well, flippin' heck, look at that...

Cogden Wryneck at many, many yards range. Yes!

By the time I got round to the spot there was no sign of it. And as far as I'm aware it hasn't been seen since, which is a real shame. I do get great pleasure from sharing decent birds, and it's been pretty disappointing that locally I haven't been able to do that at all this year. I'd like to think I'll get another chance before the autumn is out, but I suspect I've used up more than my fair share of chances already.

Strangely, despite a roaring start, the morning's final tally was much more sparse than I envisaged. Rather than the hatful I was expecting, those two early Chiffs were joined by just one more, and four Blackcaps, and the only other stand-out bird was a Whinchat. However, do I care? Nope!

Finally, nocmig. I have to say, the autumn has been very, very slow for me. I'm glad that the spring/early summer period was so good, because I would otherwise be finding it hard to maintain some enthusiasm. However, on Sunday night's recording was a new species for me. I shan't bother with a spectrovid, because it would be less than exciting, but this is what it looks like...

Redwing. The first of many I hope.

Slow Birding

My first autumn trip to Scilly was in October 1984, and looking back I reckon very little of it involved what I now think of as actual birding. It was basically a full-on week of twitching. But my next autumn trip was very different...

The last two weeks of September 1986 began with a very wet, very windy Scillonian crossing. It was blowing a sodden hoolie from the SE, which did not relent until the following day, when the sun appeared and shone its happy rays on hedgerows leaping with birds. I no longer have the old notebooks, but my memory tells me that common migrants were everywhere. Assorted warblers, chats and flycatchers, an abundance which called for a birding approach that I've employed on every Scilly trip since. Stop at every gateway, scan every hedge, look along every furrow, etc, etc.

Slow birding.

Sure, it isn't rocket science, but it is surprising how few birders do it. An advantage of this kind of approach is that it will often give you a feel for which spots are particularly birdy right now, and then you can add 'wait a bit, and see what pops out' to your list of tactics. I love birding this way. Mind you, I don't always have the discipline it demands and sometimes cover ground much quicker than I ought. But when I do manage to take it easy and be a bit more thorough, there is usually something to show for it.

I would like to report that my efforts in this regard have paid off handsomely in my local birding, but, er...

The best recent(-ish) four birds I've found close to home are probably these:

• Hoopoe - flushed as I walked along.
• Golden Oriole - flew across my line of sight as I walked along, and could well have been flushed from the hedge I was following.
• Red-backed Shrike - raised bins to check Linnets, and there was the shrike in the same field of view!
• Wryneck - disturbed (almost flushed) as I walked along.

In other words, not one of them is the result of a careful, systematic scan, or a patient bit of 'wait and see', or any other particularly commendable tactic. No, all four were the result of jam, and just being there. Ah well...

Nevertheless, I can think of many, many less spectacular birds which have recently fallen to slow birding. Pied and Spotted Flycatchers, Wheatears by the score, Whinchats, assorted common warblers, and so on.

Even this afternoon, during a lovely walk from West to East Bexington and back, carefully searching a grassy field of sheep in the hope of Richard's Pipit or something, produced a Green Woodpecker poking around. Just a Green Woodpecker, but one I would have missed otherwise. And had it been something rare instead, well, wouldn't I have been chuffed with my cleverness! To be honest, by local standards it was quiet today. In 3.5 hours up to 19:00 I saw just 7 Chiffchaffs, 1 Blackcap and 2 Wheatears. But I would have missed even the Wheatears if I hadn't spent a good while scanning the ploughed fields at East Bex...

Slow birding's reward. A cracking male Wheatear.

And why was I scanning the ploughed fields? Well, where shall I begin? Dotterel, Buff-breasted Sandpiper...who knows? At one point I found myself staring intently at something 'interesting', lying low in the soil. With bins I couldn't quite make it out. It did look birdy, but alas, a bit too static. I changed position to see if it turned into an obvious lump of wood or something. Nope. Still birdy, yet for some reason it didn't quite look kosher. So I got the camera out and took a photo at 2000mm zoom. Ah...

This is the resulting photo. See it?

No wonder it had me going. I think it might be a lump of Pheasant. Definitely feathers anyway.

Here are a couple of West Bex photos, in order to illustrate the kind of habbo that is just begging for a bit of slow birding. Taken from the same spot, one looks downhill towards the sea, the other uphill towards the coast road...

A bit of West Dorset coast. Birds like it, and often hide in it.

Not much today, but tomorrow...?

As the autumn deepens, and parts of the east coast give birders based elsewhere a tantalising glimpse of what is dropping in on this green and pleasant land, expectation is raised. You cannot help it. However [relatively] mundane your local birding haunts may be, there is hope, there is optimism. And somewhere, somehow, sometime soon, someone will score big-time. Personally I hope it's the result of some nice, careful, slow birding...

Just imagine if the slowly-birded bunting went 'tic' instead of 'tsiew'. One day...

A Puzzler

There was a strong south-westerly blowing this morning, so I made the effort to wrap up in multiple layers and waterproofs in readiness for a protracted seawatch. I don't know why I bother. I endured 30 minutes of infinite direness, peeled off a couple of layers and went for a short, uneventful walk at Cogden. Three Chiffs and a Blackcap are not enough meat for a full NQS post, so I'm going to pad it out with something which I've been wanting an excuse to write about...

After the morning Wryneck two weeks ago I went to work over in Seaton. As is often the case, at lunchtime I found myself picking through the Axe Estuary gulls. A preening first-year bird on the far bank caught my eye, mainly because I glimpsed the tail pattern and thought it looked extremely contrasty. A strongly black-and-white tail is a good indicator for Yellow-legged or Caspian Gull. Unfortunately it turned out to be neither, but was nevertheless interesting enough to hold my attention for a while. A few photos...

On the water it looks quite unexciting. The tertials and greater coverts look pretty bog standard Herring Gull, as do the head and bill. However, moult-wise it seems to have a lot more 2nd-generation (ie, first-winter) scapulars than you would normally see on a Herring Gull of this age in Devon in early(ish) September.

And that underwing is strikingly pale. If it had been a Caspian Gull I would have been pointing that out as a feature in its favour!

Again, not many of those scaps are still juvenile feathers. Quite a strong inner primary window though, which suggests Herring Gull to me more than Casp, and definitely more than YLG.

But look at that tail pattern! Again, if it had been a Casp I would be highlighting how the crisp, black terminal band contrasting strongly with a vivid white uppertail supports the identification!

So, what is it? When I posted these pics on Twitter I got very little feedback. Probably nobody fancied sticking their neck out. One birder whose opinion I respect suggested it was just a Herring Gull. And he may well be right. However, in my own experience I cannot recall ever seeing a juv/1st-winter HG display such a striking tail. Combine that feature with the rather advanced scapular moult and the pale underwing, and I cannot help thinking that this is a hybrid beast. I doubt it's a pure HGxCasp, but would be surprised if there were not some Caspian Gull genes somewhere in the mix.

All good fun. And a reminder that gull ID is frequently not a done deal. It's funny, I am conscious that some birders think I'm quite good at gulls, an 'expert' even. Nothing could be further from the truth. I am a learner.  Please be aware, when asking for my opinion on a bird you are doing the birding equivalent of asking the keen DIY-er to build your two-storey extension. He might gamely have a go, but...

Anyway, here are a couple of pukka Axe Caspian Gulls for comparison...

December 2011. Although this bird has quite a strong inner primary window, note how dark the outer webs of those inner primaries are in comparison to the bird above.

March 2012. Photo by Dave Land. Note wing and tail patterns.

So, apologies for such an early gull post. Hopefully some proper autumn fare will get things back on to a more appropriate footing soon...

Am I a Patch Birder?

I do get pleasure from writing this blog. Clearly it fills some creative urge that periodically demands attention, and quite often I will dip into old posts and enjoy doing so. However, that isn't always the case. Just occasionally a browse through the NQS archives has me cringing a bit. This happened the other day. I was reminded of something I wrote about local patch birding, or more specifically, local patch birders. Revisiting it now, especially in the light of my own birding exploits and experiences of the last year or so, it does not read well, and if I were to write that post again it would look a lot different. Still, I guess that must be the case for just about anyone who writes. One's views and opinions change and evolve. Mature, even...

I realise this is a strange way to introduce a post about patch birding, but I suppose what I'm trying to convey is my own ambivalence about the whole concept of local patch birding. I am not a patch birder, and yet I am. I think. Possibly.

When I lived in Seaton, what we referred to as the Axe Patch was in reality the land area within a 5km radius of the old bridge over the River Axe by Seaton harbour, plus the sea visible from that 10km of coastline. As patches go, that's pretty huge, but it nevertheless fulfills one aspect of a 'patch' which I've always viewed as a given: it has geographical limits. It also has a list. Back in about 2007 I diligently trawled through as many bird record sources as I could think of in order to compile a definitive 'Axe Patch List'. At one time I could have told you the exact size of that list, and many trivial details relating to it. Likewise I knew my personal Axe Patch list, and the aching gaps in it, several of them the result of painful dips...

So. A boundary. A list. Just a couple of criteria which to me are part and parcel of what defines a patch. Or can a patch actually be a much looser affair? Locally I might go birding at Cogden, or maybe Burton Bradstock, East Bexington, West Bexington, etc. And when I'm working over in Seaton, I might visit Black Hole Marsh or Beer Head, and of course the Axe Estuary is a regular lunch stop. Is any or all of this my patch? Can I legitimately refer to myself as a patch birder? Do I qualify?

Or am I just overthinking it?!

Anyway, yesterday afternoon I dropped in on my patch/not-patch (some of the West and East Bexington part) and tallied 3 Wheatears, and singles of Spotted Flycatcher, Whinchat and White Wagtail. To be honest, judging by local reports I wasn't expecting much, but not seeing - or even hearing - any Chiffchaffs was a surprise. I took a few photos, but the camera is not a fan of gloomy, overcast afternoons...

East Bex Wheatear...

...and East Bex Whinchat