Day 3 can only be described as bad. It had clouded over during the night but the cloud was high up and there was no rain. No new birds seemed to have arrived and others had definitely moved on so. A skulky Dunnock was the only excitement I had and I spent much of my time reading the messages that kept coming in of amazing birds on Utsira (where quite a few Oslo birders, if not The Oslo Birder 😉, are at the moment) Grey-cheeked Thrush and Red-eyed Vireo from the west and a Raddes Warbler from the east were birds I would have liked to see on Røst….
I used the thermal imager a bit and found a single Jack Snipe and 2 rats…
I have about an hour of birding tomorrow before catching the ferry back to Bodø. A lot can happen in an hour…(or not).
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…☺️
On Friday I received some pictures from SteinarAndersen asking for confirmation as to what type of bread eating hybrid duck he
had found in suburban Oslo. It is not always easy to work out the parents of
hybrids with the Wigeon x Mallard hybrid at Østensjøvannet being a difficult
combo (see picture in previous post) but this particular hybrid was a clear 50:50 mixture of its parents: it
was a Pintard – Pintail x Mallard (in Norwegian a Stjokkand – stjertand x
stokkand).
The head, neck, tail and bill showed the clear
influence of the Pintail while the body was Mallard.
I visited the bird yesterday and found it easily where
a smelly, dirty stream plunged out of pipe and people clearly fed this bird and
the 30 or so Mallards it kept company with.
I found another male of this hybrid combo in early2019 but that bird later suffered the ignominy of being blinged whereas this bird was
blingless so is presumably a new bird (bling can fall off). A female Pintail spent
5? winters at Østensjøvannet (although has not returned this winter) and it
tempting to think that these hybrids are the result of her pairing with one of
the male Mallards that often showed her attention.
