Thanks Rockfowl
Okay Mike, if the chap you mention has a thing about Great Tits, then he'll be drooling over the attached (as per the note at the foot of this post ;-)
And if you really want to see the "warts and all shots", I'm also posting a shot of Little Grebe, and a Yellow-bellied Tit (the darkness, rain and bamboo, though, do at least lend a bit of atmosphere to this photo ;-).
Putting the dodgy photo to one side for a monent, it was actually the first time I've seen Yellow-bellied Tit south of the Yangtze River.
And while I'm at it, I'll mention the other birds I saw at Xijiao: c20 Chinese Blackbirds, several White's Thrushes, a Red-flanked Bluetail, a few Spotted Doves, and, not forgetting of course, the Japanese Robin.
1 species photographed that is "new" for the year:
261 Little Grebe
BTW Birds of East Asia maps Southern Great Tit in Shanghai (with Eastern Great Tit, north of the Yangtze), but I'm not so sure (the attached, which should be labelled "southern", looks to me either like ssp artatus (a race of Eastern ie minor?) or a mongrel - too much green on the nape to be a Southern, and not nearly enough black on the breast to be an Eastern. The song was very different to what I normally hear in the north though... maybe they use the Shanghai dialect here ;-).
Anyhow, on the off chance that someone's interested in the complexities of this, I'm attaching a link to Systematic notes on Asian birds. 50 Types of the Aegithalidae, Remizidae and Paridae by Dickinson et al.
http://www.repository.naturalis.nl/document/41734
I must admit that the above lost me after the third or fourth page (of its 48 pages).
Okay Mike, if the chap you mention has a thing about Great Tits, then he'll be drooling over the attached (as per the note at the foot of this post ;-)
And if you really want to see the "warts and all shots", I'm also posting a shot of Little Grebe, and a Yellow-bellied Tit (the darkness, rain and bamboo, though, do at least lend a bit of atmosphere to this photo ;-).
Putting the dodgy photo to one side for a monent, it was actually the first time I've seen Yellow-bellied Tit south of the Yangtze River.
And while I'm at it, I'll mention the other birds I saw at Xijiao: c20 Chinese Blackbirds, several White's Thrushes, a Red-flanked Bluetail, a few Spotted Doves, and, not forgetting of course, the Japanese Robin.
1 species photographed that is "new" for the year:
261 Little Grebe
BTW Birds of East Asia maps Southern Great Tit in Shanghai (with Eastern Great Tit, north of the Yangtze), but I'm not so sure (the attached, which should be labelled "southern", looks to me either like ssp artatus (a race of Eastern ie minor?) or a mongrel - too much green on the nape to be a Southern, and not nearly enough black on the breast to be an Eastern. The song was very different to what I normally hear in the north though... maybe they use the Shanghai dialect here ;-).
Anyhow, on the off chance that someone's interested in the complexities of this, I'm attaching a link to Systematic notes on Asian birds. 50 Types of the Aegithalidae, Remizidae and Paridae by Dickinson et al.
http://www.repository.naturalis.nl/document/41734
I must admit that the above lost me after the third or fourth page (of its 48 pages).
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