Stonechat

The arrival of spring has not been as explosive as I dreamed and those birds with names beginning with S are only slowly appearing in my binoculars. I can add another two species to the list of four I have already mentioned in the form of Stonechat and Shelduck but am struggling to come up with a seventh to make it S Club 7. Of the six I have now seen only three though.

Shelduck was just an oversight when I listed the first migrants but Stonechat was an omission based on it being such a rarity but times are a changing. In Oslo and Bærum (which I include because of Fornebu) this weekend four!! Stonechat were present with two in Oslo and another two on Fornebu. They came in cold, snowy conditions when an insect eater should really struggle to find food but then again they are not an extremely early migrant for nothing and clearly know how to find food in these conditions. I failed to find my own chat at the weekend and also failed in attempts to twitch one after being shown very juicy photos that a photographer had taken and which he was unsure as to the identity of. But yesterday morning I caught up with a female found on Sunday at Fornebu which I had really expected to have moved on overnight as it was a clear night. It showed well as fresh snow fell and often dropped to the ground clearly having seen a food item but I did not see it actually eat anything.

The first spring record of Stonechat in Oslo and Bærum was in 1977 but it was then another 21 years before the next in 1998 and in the next 22 years there were just records in six years. From 2021 though the species has been annual and records are also occurring earlier than before. Four in a year in both 2021 and 2024 is the record so having already reached that number this year when we can get birds until the middle of April is clearly something special. Exactly where these birds are migrating to remains and what subspecies are involved remains a bit of a mystery. The small breeding population on the west coast of Norway are described as hibernans and are very early migrants whereas the subspecies that breeds further south in Europe and that is advancing north in Sweden is rubicola which migrates later. Birds this early in the spring would could be expected to be hibernans but I am not aware of any increase or change in distribution of their population to explain the explosion of records in recent years. If they are rubicola are they just birds overshooting their new breeding areas in southern Sweden? And if so why aren’t they establishing themselves as breeders in Norway and why are they arriving so early?

 

And the third S Club species I have seen in addition to Stock Dove and Stonechat? Starling, with a flock of 9 looked a bit forlorn in a treetop on Bygdøy.

female Stonechat (Svartstrupe)

proof of where it was

here it had flown down onto the snow having seen a food item

I may have found no spring migrants yet in Maridalen but I again saw two different Pygmy Owls on Sunday with this one being at a site where I also had sightings in the late autumn and being the fourth different bird I have seen the last few weeks. It also sang as can be heard in the video

Three Long-tailed Ducks at Fornebu:

And Purple Sandpipers at Huk, Bygdøy taken with the phone: