MKinHK
Mike Kilburn
On Monday I took the day off work to go to Mai Po to look for Hong Kong's first Franklin's Gull, which had been found from the Boardwalk hide by Richard Lewthwaite on Saturday. My prescience in booking a day off on Friday looked even more amazing when a Booted Warbler - another first for Hong Kong was identified from photographs and subsequently seen in a reed bed near the Tower Hide at Mai Po on Sunday afternoon.
The only problem was that my Mai Po permits had long expired, and with the issuing of permits having been recently tightened I found myself being rebuffed when I asked for a day permit. Thankfully the Reserve Manager appeared at the crucial moment and the permits were secured and at the very genteel hour of 0845 I walked down the casuarinas to see Graham Talbot, who had been there since first light strolling towards me with just enough bounce in his step to suggest something more positive than the "nothing yet" I was expecting.
And indeed the bird had appeared on the top of some reeds for a few seconds before dropping down again. After a very short time the Booted Warbler popped up again, and just 40 metres away, and began exploring the reed heads for food in the morning sunshine. It continued to show down to about 30 metres for the next hour or so. Rather than showing the classic milky tea autumn plumage( which I recall from mu first Booted Warbler - on Portland Bill in October 1987) it had begun its moult and the back and head were a somewhat richer colour (almost masala tea?), but the combination of the rounded crown, bill and leg colour and square ended tail eliminated all the accros and phylloscs. I had not been optimistic about seeing it and in the end these views fully justified taking my scope out of the house for the first time in two or three years!
This being Mai Po there were plenty of other great birds around, including young Greater Spotted and Imperial Eagles, a Yellow Bittern in the same reedbed as the Booted Warbler, masses of Silky Starlings and a few White-cheeked Starlings, a flight of Black-faced Spoonbills, and a flyover Eurasian Curlew, multiple Great and Little Egrets and a fine adult Purple Heron sunning itself atop a bush, three or four Eastern Buzzards, a handful of Shovelers and a Scrape holding 60-odd more Black-faced Spoonbills, a Grey Plover, two Common Greenshanks and 100-odd Avocet, plus more dabbling ducks.
Loads of Dusky Warblers 'takk"-ed in the undergrowth and five or six Daurian Redstarts brightened proceeding from time to time as did a flyby female Yellow-billed Grosbeak and the usual greeling (made-up word) of the feral Azure-winged Magpies plus, much less expected, two Red-billed Blue Magpies were lurking along the path to the hide on the main scrape. An Asian Small Mongoose wandering unafraid along the road was a nice bonus mammal just before I went down the Boardwalk to look for the Franklin’s Gull on the rising tide.
The tide was way out and I was pleasantly surprised to find a nice scattering of Pacific Golden Plovers, Grey Plovers, Dunlins and Kentish Plovers feeding right in front of the hide, with an occasional Saunders Gull dropping and the bulk of the gulls far out on the mud or even further out in the bay. As the tide came in so did 50-odd Eurasian Curlews, a few Great Knot and great sheaves of Avocet. Further distraction ever closer in came from a rectangular shaped crab practicing slow yoga and a couple of mudskippers fanning their dorsal fins to display the pale electric blue spots.
After forty-odd minutes I picked up a darker-looking small gull on a distant scan, which happily proved to be the Franklin’s Gull, but at a range so great that you had to know what you were looking at to identify it! Thankfully over the next hour it twice moved closer, until, at around 250m it was sufficiently close that the eye crescents could be clearly seen against the dark hood, as could the lack of white inside the dark wingtip suggest it was a second winter adult. Other good features included the uniform iron-grey back, white tips to the primaries, short dark legs and short slightly downward- pointing bill that was way too short to be Laughing Gull. While these were hardly crippling views they were more than enough to deliver the extraordinary (and I think unprecedented) double of two Hong Kong Firsts on the same day!
I wrapped up the day with a few hours at Long Valley, which was birdy without delivering anything outstanding. The highlights were a fine male Chestnut-eared Bunting and eight Greater Painted-snipe in an overgrown pool, which also held lingering Black-browed and Oriental Reed Warblers and seven Yellow-breasted Buntings. I also picked up a couple of Red-rumped Swallows as I was walking out. I also enjoyed the spectacle of hundreds of Tree Sparrows, Scaly-breasted and White-rumped Munias feeding on the rice planted by HKBWS to attract seedeaters, but could not pick up a female House Sparrow which had been photographed a week or two earlier. This is more exciting than it sounds as House Sparrow as only added to the Hong Kong list last year on the basis of records of the bactrianus subspecies that breeds in Xinjiang and turned up at Long Valley and a bit further east in Guangdong.
Cheers
Mike
The only problem was that my Mai Po permits had long expired, and with the issuing of permits having been recently tightened I found myself being rebuffed when I asked for a day permit. Thankfully the Reserve Manager appeared at the crucial moment and the permits were secured and at the very genteel hour of 0845 I walked down the casuarinas to see Graham Talbot, who had been there since first light strolling towards me with just enough bounce in his step to suggest something more positive than the "nothing yet" I was expecting.
And indeed the bird had appeared on the top of some reeds for a few seconds before dropping down again. After a very short time the Booted Warbler popped up again, and just 40 metres away, and began exploring the reed heads for food in the morning sunshine. It continued to show down to about 30 metres for the next hour or so. Rather than showing the classic milky tea autumn plumage( which I recall from mu first Booted Warbler - on Portland Bill in October 1987) it had begun its moult and the back and head were a somewhat richer colour (almost masala tea?), but the combination of the rounded crown, bill and leg colour and square ended tail eliminated all the accros and phylloscs. I had not been optimistic about seeing it and in the end these views fully justified taking my scope out of the house for the first time in two or three years!
This being Mai Po there were plenty of other great birds around, including young Greater Spotted and Imperial Eagles, a Yellow Bittern in the same reedbed as the Booted Warbler, masses of Silky Starlings and a few White-cheeked Starlings, a flight of Black-faced Spoonbills, and a flyover Eurasian Curlew, multiple Great and Little Egrets and a fine adult Purple Heron sunning itself atop a bush, three or four Eastern Buzzards, a handful of Shovelers and a Scrape holding 60-odd more Black-faced Spoonbills, a Grey Plover, two Common Greenshanks and 100-odd Avocet, plus more dabbling ducks.
Loads of Dusky Warblers 'takk"-ed in the undergrowth and five or six Daurian Redstarts brightened proceeding from time to time as did a flyby female Yellow-billed Grosbeak and the usual greeling (made-up word) of the feral Azure-winged Magpies plus, much less expected, two Red-billed Blue Magpies were lurking along the path to the hide on the main scrape. An Asian Small Mongoose wandering unafraid along the road was a nice bonus mammal just before I went down the Boardwalk to look for the Franklin’s Gull on the rising tide.
The tide was way out and I was pleasantly surprised to find a nice scattering of Pacific Golden Plovers, Grey Plovers, Dunlins and Kentish Plovers feeding right in front of the hide, with an occasional Saunders Gull dropping and the bulk of the gulls far out on the mud or even further out in the bay. As the tide came in so did 50-odd Eurasian Curlews, a few Great Knot and great sheaves of Avocet. Further distraction ever closer in came from a rectangular shaped crab practicing slow yoga and a couple of mudskippers fanning their dorsal fins to display the pale electric blue spots.
After forty-odd minutes I picked up a darker-looking small gull on a distant scan, which happily proved to be the Franklin’s Gull, but at a range so great that you had to know what you were looking at to identify it! Thankfully over the next hour it twice moved closer, until, at around 250m it was sufficiently close that the eye crescents could be clearly seen against the dark hood, as could the lack of white inside the dark wingtip suggest it was a second winter adult. Other good features included the uniform iron-grey back, white tips to the primaries, short dark legs and short slightly downward- pointing bill that was way too short to be Laughing Gull. While these were hardly crippling views they were more than enough to deliver the extraordinary (and I think unprecedented) double of two Hong Kong Firsts on the same day!
I wrapped up the day with a few hours at Long Valley, which was birdy without delivering anything outstanding. The highlights were a fine male Chestnut-eared Bunting and eight Greater Painted-snipe in an overgrown pool, which also held lingering Black-browed and Oriental Reed Warblers and seven Yellow-breasted Buntings. I also picked up a couple of Red-rumped Swallows as I was walking out. I also enjoyed the spectacle of hundreds of Tree Sparrows, Scaly-breasted and White-rumped Munias feeding on the rice planted by HKBWS to attract seedeaters, but could not pick up a female House Sparrow which had been photographed a week or two earlier. This is more exciting than it sounds as House Sparrow as only added to the Hong Kong list last year on the basis of records of the bactrianus subspecies that breeds in Xinjiang and turned up at Long Valley and a bit further east in Guangdong.
Cheers
Mike
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