Røst day 3

Cloudless blue skies and a fresh easterly wind meant as expected a bit of a clear out with no new arrivals except perhaps for a small increase in Redwings.

My undoubted highlight was getting even better views of an adult Gyr Falcon than yesterday. It appeared to be a different, larger bird and it is unusual to see adults out on the coast. Normally young birds move to the coast whilst the adults remain close to their breeding territories.

As a sign of how quiet things were the other highlights were a hybrid duck and a plastic duck. A female Pintail x Mallard hybrid was a first for me but seemed to be a quite obvious hybrid between these two species even though female hybrids are much more difficult to identify than males. The plastic duck was a male Mandarin. I could try to argue that it was shy and if a Two-barred Greenish can turn up here then surely a wild duck from China can but it has been around for ages…☺️

Today’s eBird checklist can be seen here.

Tomorrow is forecast to be cloudy with possibly some drizzle which should mean new, and hopefully exciting, arrivals.

Adult Gyr Falcon (jaktfalk)

And the smallest falcon - a Merlin (dvergfalk) chasing a Hooded Crow

Young Peregrine (vandrefalk) chasing a Ruff (brushane)

Female Pintail x Mallrd hybrid (stjertand x stokkand) with a female Pintail

The hybrid at the bottom with an upperwing looking very like a Pintail

The head pattern, leg colour, tertials and tail resemble Mallard but the rest is more Pintail

A poor photo but the green of the speculum can be seen

Male Mandarin coming out of eclipse plumage

Golden Plovers (heilo) here are tame and also garden birds

The Taiga Bean Goose 

Twite (bergirisk)

Snow Bunting (snøspurv)

Arctic Redpoll (polarsisik)

I cycled a lot today and only clocked up 11663 steps