As I was about to head out the door for work a small, but rather robust bird perched on the topmost branches of a leafless tree across the far side of the grassland caught my eye.
There was just enough odd about it to be worth a quick glance with the bins, but it was still pretty distant. On my initial brief views through the green-tinted glass the bill appeared to have hint of warmth about it, and I assumed it was a female Chinese Grosbeak. I headed for the door, and had already got my shoes on before my subconscious kicked in, and started pounding hard on alarm bells buried deep in my skull, and demanded I check properly if lost tail feathers were really the reason it looked so stubby and whether that really was just a shadow under the bill . . .
Getting the scope on it from the balcony confirmed it was indeed a
Hawfinch (the Chinese name for Hawfinch is Steel-billed Finch, and it required a swift check in Brazil to remind me that winter birds have horn-coloured bills).
At present this species is a considered by the records committee to be an escape owing to the fact that several unseasonal birds have turned up with obvious cage damage. Furthermore, a February bird from three years ago appeared to have uneven tail feathers, which led the Records Committee to suspect it may have been of captive origin. (they also decided the same, albeit with obvious hesitation, on my
Red-headed Bunting from December. Scroll down to the bottom of the posting for the full story
However this record, and another just posted today, but photographed in Yuen Long on Tuesday
(here) adds to a clear pattern of mid-late winter occurrence of Hawfinch in recent years.
However, there have been only been 3 or 4 previous winter records and regardless of what's ultimately decided, its another cracking addition to the Lam Tsuen list!
On a less ambiguous note there were two
Chinese Blackbirds in the veggies this morning, along with the
Grey-backed and
Japanese Thrushes and the female
Daurian Redstart . And as a sobering reminder of how close we all are to eternity, a
Crested Goshawk oozed menace from the same papaya tree that yesterday's Chinese Blackbird posed on so well yesterday morning. When I looked back for the Hawfinch it had, unsurprisingly, disappeared.
Cheers
Mike