Day of Days

Last night the word famous MOGA movement had one of its world famous meetings and there has never been such a crowd ever before in the history of the universe. It has been said by many that this movement is the greatest movement in the birding world and there has never been seen anything like it EVER and of course as its leader I am the most respected and handsome birder in the history of not just birding but the universe.

If we are to be honest (but one should of course never be so) then Making Owling Great Again didn’t have the most successful outing last night with Tengmalm’s again being absent but Pygmy and Tawny did reveal themselves to Jack and I 😉

even if MOGA meetings don't deliver what it says on the tin you cannot deny it is GREAT to be out in the forest at night

 

Today though has been an epic day!

When walking the Beast this morning Redwings were moving and it felt birdy so I decided that Fornebu needed to be grilled to find some wing bars. It was indeed birdy and Chiffchaffs were huetting all over the place but I struggled to find anything unusual until an F35 streaked through the skies high above me and a few seconds after it had passed then I heard it as did some Bearded Tits (should I start calling them Reedlings?) which called from the reedbed by me. This was if anything rarer than a YbW. My last sighting of a Beardie was a year and a half ago whilst of Ybw only a year ago. There turned out to be 4 birds but only one, a female, showed relatively well and she was ringed. It would be interesting to know from whence the lady has cometh.

a ringed female Bearded Tit (skjeggmeis)

They were surprisingly quiet and skulky which suggests they may well have been around a few days as freshly arrived birds are usually very restless and noisy. So, a year tick and a species I have been hoping would turn up and spend the winter at Fornebu. Whether they stay needs to be seen but it will be fun finding out.

The day though had only just begun. After a good walk around Storøya and taking in Koksa as well as Storøykilen I decided to stop at the last remaining area of Nansenparken which seems to have any attraction to passerines – namely the urban vegetable patch. I was thinking of a rare Stonechat or Wheatear but instead a Turtle Dove flew up!!! Only my third ever in Norway and my first self-found one this was a proper rarity and I put the news out pronto. It was a very smart bird and seem settled until for no obvious reason it took off and disappeared but 6 others managed to see it.

My Norwegian list is a very modest 326 species but my self found list is now 287 which is decidedly respectable.

the Turtle Dove (turteldue) when I found it

it soon moved up onto a lamppost allowing this photo to prove where it was

although the plumage looks very adult like the lesser coverts are pale and I think juvenile so I reckon it is a very advanced 1cy

here we can see that the inner primaries are new adult ones and the outer primaries are old juvenile ones

the obligatory selfie

But the day was still not over. A Caspian Gull that was very belatedly reported from Middelalderparken in central Oslo a couple of weeks ago and a message came through that it had been refound at exactly the same time the dove flew off so 15 minutes later I was looking for it. The pictures I had first seen of the bird leave me feeling it is perhaps more cactus than cach but my viewpoint may be conflicted as my only self-found cach was eventually not approved as the records committee saw it as more of a cactus (if this is making no sense to you then cactus comes from the latin name of Caspian which is cachinnans and Herring Gull which is argentatus meaning the bird is a hybrid between these two species). I am also the first to admit that I suck when it comes to gulls and today's pictures do look more convincing. It was a small bird so presumably a female no matter who its mum and dad are.

The gull, if pure, was of course also a year tick so three potential year ticks on the same day in October when not on an island is bloody good going!

Here are my poor pictures and I must also admit that when I took them I did not think it was the bird but can see now that it is......

a gull with a lot of and perhaps 100% Caspian in it

the gulls were being fed by a concerned citizen and as soon as they saw her arriving they flew up to her so she is clearly a regular fixture. Here a tight mass of gulls were tucking into the food that she emptied out.

Was it a Caspian afterall?

Well this is a tad embarrassing and unsatisfactory and also a good example of why I usually let others do the gull finding. Wasn’t it nice when we just had Herring Gulls? I’ve just had a nostalgic look at Peter Grants Gull book - the authorative text in the 1980’s - and cachinnans was just a subspecies which warranted 9 lines of text whereas now it warrants pages and pages and huge ID articles).

The gull which I featured in yesterdays post after the Glaucous Gulls was clearly strange enough to get my attention and document it and although it was Caspian Gull that was going through my mind the bird didn't match my own mental picture of what a 1^st winter Caspian should look like – an image formed by pictures of “classic” birds on the web plus this well watched 1^st winter from 2 winters ago (Caspian Gulls are still rare bird in Norway with few oppurtunities to study them around Oslo). When I got home I therefore was more interested in deciding whether the second Glaucous was a hybrid or not and didn’t spend too much time on the Caspo like creature. When I eventually did look at it my interest was again aroused although I was thinking more along the lines of a hybrid and I sent some pictures to Sindre M who agreed that it could be (probably was) a hybrid and I may have left it that but felt it was interesting enough to put it out on the Facebook group Western Palearctic Gulls asking whether there were others who thought it contained Capsian genes. The answers didn’t take long to arrive (despite the late hour) and there were immediate comments that it was a pure Caspian. This was a surprise as I had half expected comments along the lines of strange Herring Gull but the general consensus (with the excpetion of half of the Norwegian and Finnish commentators who prefer hybrid) was that it was a Caspian and Lou Bertalan even went to the trouble of scoring it on the Gibbons et al scoring system from a British Birds Article and placed it right on the Caspian side of the Caspian/hybrid threshold. Now I will be honest and not claim to fully understand how he has scored the bird (requires more experience of this field than I can claim to have) but based on this feedback then it would seem that the bird may be good! In an out of range context it might not be the classic looking bird we would want to find in Norway but equally it isn’t a Herring either and all these LWHG have enormous variation in plumage and structure such that where the lines are drawn are sometimes quite arbitrary and DNA apparently doesn’t always help either…..

I have posted the pictures on the Norwegian reporting system asking for comments but do not expect to receive any. The Norwegian birding community which is always shy/apathetic/worried about reputation (delete based on personal opinion) is currently going through a cyclical low in engagement  and I think at the moment you could post a picture of a Peacock labelled as a Blue Tit and nobody (OK there are a couple of people who care) would be arsed to comment.

So we will see where this gull ends up. At the end of the day it will be my fellow NSKF members who will be responsible for making judgement on the bird (unless the species gets removed as a national rarity before then.…)

Here are my pictures of the bird (yesterday’s plus a couple more) plus the scoring done by Lou Bertalan on FB based on the first 2 pictures.

And Lou Bertalan's scoring (from Facebook):

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Extent of scapular moult
1 a small number (less than 1/3) of first-generation feathers remaining

Greater-covert pattern
1 white edges with delicate notches or vermiculation; or dark brown centre with white tip to 1/3 of length (i.e. white restricted to tip or distal third)

Bill shape
1 Slim, slight gonydeal angle (ratio 2.87, so actually >2,8 but there is a slight gonys angle visible)

Leg length
1 Moderately long

Ventral bulge
0,5 - there is a very slight bulge visible but note especially the flat belly in front of it!

Primary projection
1 moderately long (ratio 0.5

Moult: greater coverts
5 no moult

Moult: median coverts
4 one or two feathers moulted

Moult: tertials
3 all old

Darkness of head and body
1 reduced grey wash or streaking (confined to flanks and/or single streaks around nape)

First-generation tertial pattern
1 fine pale fringe around distal portion (like classic michahellis), possibly also with some vermiculations

Second-generation scapular pattern
2 strong, contrasting shaft-streaks, anchors and/or dark central diamonds, but these more patterned feathers are less than 1/2 of all; ground colour creamy or silvery-grey, possibly with some grey feathers mixed in.

so this makes a score of 21,5 which is still within cachinnans, close to the border to hybrids. but it also illustrates some weakness of this scoring system. covert moult weighs too much, imo (5 points for no replaced GC!), there is no criteria for rectrices pattern which personally i give a lot of weight, and it simplifies matters of 2nd gen. scpaular pattern: there are certain types of scapular patterns and each one should be scritinized separately.

what i'd still discuss in this bird is: head jizz (mentioned as not good for caspian gulls) - yes, could sit on a weak female YLG too, especially with the slight eye smudge, but caspians can show even more dark striation around eye than this. scapular pattern is of the shaggy type with one central transversal mark and only a weak thin (or absent) subterminal band. this is a common type in caspian, can appear in other taxons too but usually more bold (double anchor in YLG, bold subterminal bar giving a scaly look in HG), which i think is often underestimated because one likes to have the nice diamond shapes or just shaft streaks as typical cachinnans pattern - but this distorts reality since at least half of all 1st winter caspians don't show this kind of expected pattern but the one more similar with the other taxons. tail in this bird is very good for cachinnans, inner wings shows the nice venetian blind with p2-4 showing pale lozenges etc...

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With regards the score of 21.5 (which is a bit cheeky as I don't think the system was meant to allow half points) the range for Caspian is 12-25 and the range for hybrid 22-32 so as you see right on the (edge of) the border.

Today I went birding at Fornebu. I didn’t find any pipits (had been talk of something possibly rare there yesterday) but the reedbed at Koksa was positively hopping with birds. A flock of Long-tailed Tits were feeding in the reeds along with good numbers of Blue Tits, Great Tits, Wrens, a Robin and surprisingly 5 Goldcrests. Best of all though was hearing at least a couple of Bearded Tits which wouldn’t show themselves but at least dispels my previous conclusion that they had moved on/perished.

A Long-tail where there should have been a Beard

Caspo

Yesterday evening I took the family out in the forests north of Maridalen to look at the stars and hopefully hear some owls. We walked 3km from the car and had a cloudless, star filled sky, next to no wind, a great time but no owls. There are also next to no reports so far this year (although it is still early) of singing Tengmalm’s Owls in Southern Norway whereas there seem to be far more than normal in Northern Norway so it looks like the rodent population is still very low in the south (which I can confirm from very few tracks in the snow) whereas in the north there is perhaps an even higher rodent population in some parts than last year.

Today the cloudless skies made for fantastic conditions although it was very cold first thing. I used the opportunity to head out into the forests again. There were not many birds to discover unfortunately although I did hear my first Hazel Grouse of the year which frustratingly I could not see although it was close by. I did also have Black Woodpecker, the Great Grey Shrike in Maridalen and the adult (male?) Goshawk perched up nicely in sunlight.

With the good light I thought I would take a trip to the dump at Alna to see if I could get better pictures of one of the Caspos although when there is too much sun taking pictures of white gulls can be quite demanding. When I arrived there were less than 50 gulls on the roof either due to a recent visit from a raptor or possibly because there was a lot of human activity within the buildings which may have put the gulls off. Fewer gulls means less chance of an interesting one being present but does make the task of grilling them easier and sure enough JAY00 was present. He was actually the gull standing closest to me and would have been difficult to miss. This is how I like gulling! The pictures are definitely better than I managed last week but the white areas are a bit burnt out.

3cy Caspian Gull alongside a 3cy Herring Gull showing nicely the subtle jizz differences (bill, eye, head, legs) plus cleaner plumage in the Caspo

 

even at distance with only the head showing it can still be picked out. The 4cy Caspo from 14 Jan was also possible to pick out just from the head view

After 15 minutes all the gulls and corvids in the area were scared up by an unseen raptor and suddenly there were hundreds of birds in the air

stills lots of activity from Common Crossbills (grankorsnebb) in Maridalen

adult (presumed male) Goshawk (hønsehauk) in Maridalen

and the Great Grey Shrike (varsler) is still going strong. Note the black line behind the bill which shouldn't be there and wasn't there on 9 Feb. Some sort of injury?

 And some non bird pictures

 

Signs of spring

Had some good birding today and there were some real signs of spring. Temperatures are again a couple of degrees in the red but the winds are from the north and minus temperatures are due to return on Thursday so although it doesn’t really feel very spring like to me it clearly is for some birds.

I had flocks of Greylag Geese in flight over both Fornebu (6) and Maridalen (4), Blue Tits and Great Tits singing, a Wood Pigeon heading purposefully over Maridalen and my first Snow Bunting of the year flying over Fornebu.

Add to this Bearded Tits, Water Rail and Reed Buntings at Fornebu, the Great Grey Shrike in Maridalen and the Peregrine sitting on top of the Plaza Hotel in downtown Oslo then there were loads of good birds to be seen today. And there was an even better bird – I caught up with JAY00, the ringed 3cy Caspian Gull. I saw him at the rubbish dump where he popped up a couple of times on the roof before disappearing down into the rubbish where I couldn’t see him. He was then seen two houra later down on the ice by the Opera which shows how luck is needed to find this and any other gull in Oslo although perseverance does ultimately seem to pay off.

There were a number of other interesting gulls at the tip including an adult yellow-legged Herring Gull and a red ringed Herring Gull which I unfortunately could not read.

3cy Caspian Gull JAY00. This bird overwintered in the Oslo are last year and received his bling on 28 Jan 2015. Here is a picture of him pre-bling on 13 Jan 2015

 

these pictures were when I first saw the bird before it disappeared down into the tip.

this is whem it turned up again on a roof further away

very clean white underwing

noticeably dark outer primaries and secondaries

this is a 3cy Herring Gull (gråmåke=. Note it has a pale eye, a much broader and less clear cut tail band, less dark secondaries and less contrasting greater coverts

Two very different looking adult Herring Gulls. I would imagine the bird on the left is a northern breeder whereas the one on the right is a southern breeder. The size difference is probably due to the left bird being a male and the right one a female

A striking yellow-legged Herring Gull with a normal ringed bird. The ringed bird was ringed  in Nov 2013 but has only been seen in the Oslo area. The yellow legged birds bill is particularly well coloured and the legs more orange than yellow which can indicate that its bare parts have changed colour due to diet

I didn't see this bird in flight but here one can see that the base of the outer primaries is grey rather than black which should dispel any thoughts that this bird is a Yellow-legged Gull rather than a yellow-legged Herring Gull

Four normal leg coloured adult Herring Gulls with different amounts of head streaking

red colour ringed Herring Gull but I cannot say for sure what the code is (ZOYA?). I think red rings are from the UK. (Edit: this is actually X4DT which was ringed on Rainham Tip London on 30.11.2013)

I couldn't read the ring on this one and must admit struggled a bit with ID but now it looks like a relatively straightforward 2cy Great Black-backed Gull (svartbak)

I did not see this noticeably small and dark gull in flight but concluded with it probably being a 2cy Lesser Black-backed Gull but am happy to be proved wrong (EDIT: I've had feedback that this is most likely a Herring Gull)

I'm not sure if this is the same individual but this bird I did see it with open wings and the primaries looked all dark although the picture does not really capture this. (I thought this bird to be a LB-b Gull but have received feedback that also this is more likely a Herring - understand why gulls aren't my favourite thing?)

Great Grey Shrike (varsler) in Maridalen

Reed Bunting (sivspurv) at Fornebu

absolutely terrible record shot of the years first Snow Bunting (snøspurv)

there were lots of Crossbills in Maridalen today but taking close pictures of them is another matter