Not really - just challenging, as ever, those that 'proclaim' without substance or evidence. It could very well be a Pallid. Comments like 'if it had a dark cap, it would be perfect' make me laugh as it doesn't have a dark cap.
fwiw, whilst I can find Monties that show the dark area reaching the lower mandible, it seems to be restricted to darker juveniles overall. Ie, it is a good feature for Pallid. On it's own though? Well, I'd want more and despite what others say, this bird is at the poorly marked end of the range for Pallid and at the strongly marked end for Montagu's.
Send it to Forsman. I'm happy to agree with whatever he says.
Again I'd go as far to say that the face pattern, being to my eyes perfect for Pallid, is 'wrong' for Montagu's. I've still yet to see a Monty's with the facial disc patterning of the subject bird.
The bird in your earlier link with the wingtag seems to be labelled as a Pallid but is actually a Montagu's, as suggested earlier in the thread. A rather well marked individual, agreed.
Re hybrids, in recent years we have been seeing an increasing number of birds with intermediate characters as the range of Pallid extends westwards from Russia. Birds are now breeding annually in Finland and interbreeding has been recorded or suspected in Sweden and Norway.
In almost all cases, so far at least, the interbreeding has been between Hen and Pallid. The apparent hybrids turning up now annually in southern Sweden in autumn are, to my knowledge, intermediate between those two species.
Pallid x Montagu's hybrids would appear to be very much rarer and, indeed, much less documented online. I have yet to see a photographed putative juvenile Pallid x Montagu's, though seem to remember hearing of a mixed pair in Spain and one in the Netherlands in recent years. For sure, such a combination seems likely to occur as Pallid continues to expand its range into Europe and would complicate matters!
Given that our subject bird does not exhibit any direct hybrid characters, I think we should think twice about playing the hybrid card because it lacks as clear a collar as some Pallids.
Hybrids remain much rarer than the real thing, whether pure Hen, Pallid or Montagu's. Personally, it seems wisest to reserve the hybrid debate for birds that really are truly intermediate on a suite of characters, rather than for birds that fall within one species' variation, as the subject bird does.
