Wrong wing bars and wrong trumpet

Rune and I took a trip to Hvaler again today and met up with Per Buertange and Morten Nilsen. My hope was to find a Pallas’s Warbler (fuglekongesanger) which have just started turning up in Scandinavia but Jules Bell had the honour of finding the first for the year in Norway over on Herdlevær near Bergen. Otherwise, I was hoping for some good passage as the weather was looking to be similar to last Thursday.

Unfortunately there was much less passage with the exception of Bullfinches (dompap) which were still going through in good numbers and we must have had over 150 during the course of the day. A fair share of the birds had trumpet like calls indicating an easterly origin. Birds with these calls would often be in the same flock as birds with a normal call suggesting that these Bullfinches are coming from a wide area of Scandinavia and probably Siberia. I hadn’t noted any Bullfinches with trumpet calls on Friday but I did hear a trumpet call which I had ID’d as being that of a Two-barred Crossbill (båndkorsnebb). Hearing these Bullfinches today made me doubt myself though so I have quietly deleted the 2BC record....

There were no 2BC’s for Rune and I today but there were Common Crossbills (grankorsnebb) flying around all the time and one small flock that landed on a dwarf pine tree and started devouring the cones contained a male with small but distinct wing bars. These type of birds are a known confusion with 2BS’s but this particular bird had far too narrow wing bars to really confuse anyone – interesting bird though.

poor picture of a Common Crossbill (grankorsnebb) with wing bars

same bird

a pair of normally marked Crossbills

Otherwise goof birds were a couple of migrating Bean Geese (sædgås) and a Ring Ouzel (ringtrost). We located a few more Chiffchaffs (gransanger) and Blackcap (munk) than I had last week but nothing rarer.

male Blackcap (munk)- guess what he was eating

on the left is a shot of got of the Siberian (tristis) Chiffchaff at Fornebu on Monday and on the right a "normal" Chiffchaff photographed today. Note the yellow tones on the normal bird espesially on the underwing coverts which are missing on the tristis