Anyone have a link to a good gallery of Iceland redpolls?
Not a particularly good gallery but here's a selection of Iceland Redpolls,
http://myndir.fuglar.is/pictures.php?type=t&id=1037
but you'll discover that none of the birds shown here looks anything like the West Midlands bird. It should be remembered that the vast majority of Icelandic birds do not look like the Midlands bird and are fairly dark but amongst the pale types there are enough borderline cases to confuse us in Iceland. Whilst some may be vagrants, many are part of the local breeding population.
The link to David Sibley's page provided by Marcus Lawson further up (and here for convenience)
http://sibleyguides.blogspot.com/2008/01/my-holiday-redpoll-photos.html
was a real eyeopener for me and the other Icelandic birders I've shown it to. If the birds in those pics are hoary-type (and I'm not for a moment doubting Sibley's ID skills) then the obvious conclusion for us in Iceland is that we should perhaps be a little less conservative about what we call Arctic Redpolls. It's no wonder that visiting Finnish and Swedish birders report Arctic Redpolls in Iceland in summer. On the other hand birders in Iceland are hesitant about calling anything other than an obvious hornemanni Arctic. I don't think the hoary-types in Sibley's blog would attract any attention at all in Iceland. As I said, a real eye opener.
It was an interesting day at my feeders on Saturday. I had the usual numbers of Redpolls in my garden, about 60-80 at the busiest, but for the first time this winter there were about a dozen paler types together. Most were just typical pale islandica but I think a case could have been made for 3-4 of them being Arctic Redpolls based on pictures of exilipes I've seen from Scandinavia and North America. One in particular appeared very large and pale, had a large white rump patch which was very finely streaked, completely white UTC, a warm buff face, and reasonably heavy streaking on the sides on a white background.
2-3 more (I had one eye on my seven-month old twins at my feet, so not sure if it was 2 or 3) were very pale grey birds, with fine streaking on the sides, unmarked white UTC, one had a very pale rose pink breast, another a very pale rose pink unstreaked rump.
Another was stone grey with virtually no brown tones at all, but was very heavily streaked above and below. Then there were several nice big brown rostrata-types.
The new link provided by Rob Stoff is very interesting as Yann Kolbeinsson came round to my house yesterday to try to ring a few and Yann's been using Troy's scale for a while when ringing Redpolls. Only four birds came in the net as it got a bit windy, all bog standard dark islandica scoring around 4-6 on Troy's scale, although one dark streaky bird did score 4 for its UTC, giving it 7 in total I think. Whilst we were waiting one pale bird toyed with us but didn't come into the net. It was perhaps one of the birds from the previous day and we couldn't really come up with any convincing reasons why it wasn't an exilipes, with very pale plumage, fine streaking on the sides, unstreaked white UTC, an apparently small bill (Yann's first comment was how small its bill was). Whatever it was, there's plenty of scope for more redpoll studies in Iceland.
E