Back on the beat
Well, no Eastern Crowned Warbler today, but I was firmly back on patch. There was the keenest of northwesterly winds with a few showers and lots of
rainbows (see below). Mid-afternoon a few skeins of
Pink-footed Geese blew across town. Later I had a walk to the Ness whilst, I'm afraid to say, listening to the football. Remember that your ears are just as important as your eyes when birding. Err, anyway, I did see a few birds even if I didn't hear much. And we can also get a couple of regular winter topics on the go.
The Eider subspecific challenge
I love nothing more than grappling with variations in drake
Common Eiders. Well maybe I love Lagavulin and cookie dough ice cream better, but it's a surprisingly close thing. This winter's first contender (and we're definitely talking winter now) was seen on one of the south piers this afternoon and then later on the river. It had really rather prominent sails, which it was enthusiastically 'erecting' no doubt to impress the nearby females. Maybe it impresses the drakes too, I don't know. Most Eiders with sails that I've seen tend to show an orangey tone to the bill with rather rounded frontal lobes. This bird had a grey-green tone to the bill, with quite pointed frontal lobes. The legs were also rather dark and grey looking. If we go along with Eider guru Martin Garner...
http://www.birdsireland.com/pages/site_pages/features/eider/eider.html
... we could speculate that this is a
borealis type from the eastern part of its range e.g. Svalbard. Indeed it looked a bit like the picture of a Svalbard bird shown on the page above, as can be seen from the excellent picture I took (see below). Okay, maybe it's not all that clear. But it was getting a bit gloomy. Or maybe it's just a local bird and maybe some of them have sails and it's nothing to get too excited about. But hey I might have a long winter's birding ahead of me, so let's keep things interesting shall we.
The Purple Sandpiper totaliser
Some regular readers of this thread have expressed an interest in seeing
Purple Sandpipers at Girdle Ness, possibly in the fairly near future. So, I thought I'd start a series of regular counts of these rather fetching calidrids. It wasn't a particularly high tide today so there was plenty of room still on the rocks at Greyhope Bay, which is where they all were. And the totaliser says:
9
Let's hope that, if we all work together, that number can shoot up during the course of the winter. There were also 40
Turnstones, 2
Dunlin and a
Golden Plover having an identity crisis with the
Oystercatchers.
I had a quick go at seawatching from the Coo, but, as seems to be the order of things these days, very little was moving aside from some distant auks and
Gannets.