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Eastern Chiffchaff - Eastern France. 14/10/09 (1 Viewer)

nickderry

C'est pas ma faute, je suis anglais.
Whilst looking for non-existant Penduline Tits near to Besançon I came across this pale looking Chiffchaff giving plenty of "pee" and "see-oo" calls. I know for certain that it's never going to be accepted as a tristis (not sure if it even is one). I was just hoping that somebody could enlighten me further on its possible origins.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIIU-dqkEe8 is a link to a video where you can at least hear the bird calling.

And as I'm a sketcher not a photographer - here are my sketches (would have been better to have a decent camera for this bird).

The bird was noticeably paler and more olive than a collybita (not a good tristis feature anyway - looked quite green in the sunlight) with a stronger supercilium (couldn't see for certain if there was any yellow in it - didn't seem to be), the bill was all dark, the cheeks had a faint buff wash to them and the throat was bright and whitish. The belly was clean whitish with a nice clear buff patch on the sides of the breast, the flanks were buffy yellow, contrasting nicely with the clean white undertail coverts. The wings showed quite strong dark centres to the tertials and a pale secondary panel (not sure if any of that is relevant but hey!) I'm thinking somewhere in the range of abietinus, but would just like to hear other people's views.
 

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Based on your sketches the bird looks very tristis-like, but the call of a pure tristis should be a straight 'heep', so I don't think that it can be identified as a pure tristis. Chiffchaffs calling like your bird appeared in pretty large numbers in Finland in late September, but those that I have seen have looked much less tristis-like than your bird (more like normal ssp abietinus Chiffchaffs). Some years birds calling like that appear earlier (this year they have probably originated somewhere more east), which means that even Finnish abietinus Chiffchaffs can call like that (but the Chiffchaffs originating from Finland don't look like that).

Edit: The call that you describe "pee" could fit tristis better, but at least I can't hear any tristis calls on the recording.
 
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This is the trouble with sketches, they don't always give the exact colour tones (the bird in question seemed quite olivey in the field - which isn't good for tristis), abietinus matches best visually what I saw, it certainly wasn't a washed out brown grey like a classic tristis. The stumbling block for me was the call, as most of the sites I've found on the net state that abietinus calls like a collybita - which this bird never did.

Chiffchaffs are just too much fun!
 
The stumbling block for me was the call, as most of the sites I've found on the net state that abietinus calls like a collybita - which this bird never did.

The fun thing about the calls of abietinus is that typically they call exactly like collybita, but during some autumns they call like your bird. Not just one or two of them, but almost all of them!
 
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