Green sandpiper, Pennington Flash

 

A green sandpiper was in Ramsdales today, a common sandpiper at the boat club and a single swift over the ruck. 

A Brocken Spectre

OK not a lot of wildlife interest in this post, but I just had show this photo of a particularly weird event that happened on my flight home from Inverness to Manchester today. 

I was looking out of the window and I saw a rainbow ring appear on the clouds outside the plane. As I watched it got brighter and brighter until suddenly the shadow of the plane appeared in the centre. It was really quite colourful, bright and sharp, but by the time I'd got my camera ready it had started to fade, but you can still make it out.

It turns out it's a Brocken spectre, something I've never seen before but which is a rare occurance from planes and on mountains. Some mountains are apparently quite prone to Brocken spectres, most notably Brocken in Germany from where it gets its name, and they are also offered as a possible explanation for the legendary Grey Man of Ben MacDui.

Brocken spectres are explained here

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brocken_spectre (opens in a new window)

A view over the Summer Isles

Today I had a day off from driving and to be honest when I've got such fabulous scenery on my doorstep, who needs to drive? I walked from Achiltibuie to Polbain and then around Fox Point and back to the car, about 7.5 miles in total. 

Birding highlight was two stunning Black-throated divers on the sea, and also large numbers of twite and white wagtails.

However this plant nearly stole the show, it's pale butterwort Pinguicula lusitanica, a plant that I've apparently only seen once before, on Handa Island in 1985, though I don't remember it. 

Achnahaird Bay

Achanaird Bay is about 6 miles from where I'm staying at Acheninver hostel in Achiltibuie and its a bit of an oasis, being a beautiful sandy beach with dunes and saltmarsh in the middle of an otherwise rocky coastline. 

It's a decent place for waders and everytime I go I feel like I'm about to find a buff-breasted sandpiper. This week there's been a fine selection albeit in small numbers, with 200 dunlin, 70 ringed plover, 30 curlew, 5 whimbrel, 3 sanderling, 5 bar-tailed godwits and a couple of turnstone, all mainly feeding on the short, grazed saltmarsh grass.

Apart from the waders, it's also good for passerines such as wheatear, pipits and wagtails, and at the moment there are about 10 white wagtails. 

Today I managed three species that I wasn't expecting, all of which were new for me in North West Scotland. 

First off was this rather grotty looking Slavonian grebe, which in its defence was undergoing its moult into non-breeding plumage. Then a little further on I flushed a woodcock from some short marshy grassland, but best of all I then saw a female marsh harrier hunting over the river bank. Apparently there are only one or two records a year in the North West Highlands so a very decent record.

Crossing the Minch on Loch Seaforth

A great crossing of the Minch today on the Ullapool to Stornaway ferry and back produced at least 10 sooty shearwaters, 30 storm petrels, 10 great skuas, 20 arctic skuas, possible long-tailed skua and 500 Manx shearwaters. It was my best trip ever on this ferry for cetaceans, with at least 3 minke whales seen together, 2 Risso's dolphins, around 40 common dolphins and 5 harbour porpoise, but it was the blows off Tiumpan head which really took the breath away, two, three, four blows in quick succession, I didn't see the animals but clearly large whales, fin or humpback. An exhilarating experience from a ferry in UK waters.

Common dolphins.

Viking gull, Ullapool harbour

I was pleased to see Ullapools resident Viking gull still at the harbour today, now resplendent in its adult summer plumage. I first saw the bird in July 2017. 

Viking gull is a hybrid glaucous x herring gull, but I have to admit, if this came in at the Pennington Flash gull roost 30 minutes after sunset on a cold, dull windy evening in January, and landed on the water 200m distant, I'd be calling this as a glaucous gull. I think it was perhaps more obviously a hybrid when it was in it's various immature plumages, see below. 

Fin, humpback and Minke whales in the Minch

I never thought that any whale watching trip in the UK could match those that I experienced in Australia and New Zealand over the past few years, but todays trip with Hebridean Whale Cruises out of Gairloch with Steve Truluck and Rosie Barrett achieved it. I was absolutely delighted when Steve said at the start that we were going to head for Tiumpan Head on the east coast of Lewis because I knew that there were some big whales in that area, but it was a long journey from Gairloch and some of the smaller stuff had to wait until later as we sped north west for around an hour. It was worth it though....

Finally we arrived off Tiumpan head. There were common dolphins all around us, many leaping out of the water, some so close to the boat that it felt like I could have touched them, and I could see others swimming under the boat. Suddenly right in the middle of them a huge shape appeared on the surface, perhaps 10x longer than the dolphins, a fin whale, the second largest animal ever to exist and it was just 15m in front of us! The dolphins seemed to enjoy its presence and surfed around it! An incredible moment. After a minute or so it arched it's back and dived, revealing it's fin which is set back on this species, about two thirds of the way along its body.

Suddenly a shout went up that there was another fin whale behind us and turning I saw the great arch of a body as a second animal also dived, again with dolphins all around it. For several minutes the whales kept surfacing and diving, and all of the time they had an escort of common dolphins. A truly breathtaking experience.

It's easy to forget when looking at these photos that common dolphins are around 2 - 2.5m in length and in the photo above you can't even see the dorsal fin of the whale because it's below the water. As I said previously, the dorsal fin is set back on fin whale but even so we're only looking at about two thirds of the animal in this photo.

Point of Stoer Lighthouse

A full day not watching whales and dolphins today at possibly the best site in North West Scotland. I spent seven hours here and saw just one white-beaked dolphin. Still, it's a very scenic spot and there were lots of birds, skuas, shearwaters, divers, auks, twite etc., but best of all, a hobby flew over the lighthouse and away south. I'm not sure if I've ever seen Hobby in Scotland before, but certainly not in this area.

A family of black-winged stilts, Doddington, Cheshire

A family party of four black-winged stilts(an adult & 3 juveniles), made for an interesting diversion on my way home from Wales and were particularly interesting being British bred birds from Potteric Carr near Doncaster. I can only remember about 5 breeding attempts by stilts in the UK in the past 40 years, and they usually fail, either the nest gets flooded or predated, so it was particularly pleasing to see three juveniles almost fully grown, though sadly one of the adults has gone, apparently taken by a peregrine.

Red-backed shrike, Whixhall Moss

This cracking female red-backed shrike was in a hedge on Whixhall Moss today and has been present for about three days. It's my first red-backed shrike anywhere for seven years.

Dotterel and spider mites

One of the key differences between gorse and western gorse is the width of the bracteole at the base of the flower, which in gorse is 3-5mm wide, whereas in western gorse it's 0.6mm wide. I was trying to photograph a bracteole today when a red spider mite walked past and proved beyond doubt that this is western gorse!

Looks can be deceiving, these Welsh hills may look as if they wouldn't hold much bird life, yet over the past two days I've seen six hobbies here including a family party of four, with two very young and recently fledged juveniles, two red kites, a ringtail hen harrier and most amazingly today I found a dotterel on top of one the hills! Unfortunately it flew almost as soon as I saw it, calling as it went. 

Juvenile hobby.

Yellow wagtails, Pennington Flash

Three yellow wagtails were at the boat club this morning and a fourth, possibly a 5th, was at Mossley Hall farm. Also at the boat club, a common sandpiper, common tern and at least 5 grey wagtails. A little egret was in a tree in Rammies and a whimbrel flew calling over the south side.

These were my first yellow wags of the year at the flash.

The strange case of the juvenile LBBGs, Pennington Flash

From the sublime to the ridiculous, hot on the heels of the identification challenges of the superb 2nd summer Cape gull comes this, an arguably even more difficult bird to identify.....and even more interestingly, where is it from and how did it get here? 

It's obviously a juvenile gull and one of four currently off the car park at the flash, two very young birds and two slightly older, but did they really make it here under their own steam? And if so where from? A possibility is that they were brought here by humans, perhaps when a nest was disturbed, but it still seems that they must be locally bred. I mean you don't go to Llandudno, find four juvenile gulls and bring them back to Pennington Flash..... do you? Surely you'd release them at the nearest park lake you can find.  And what species are they? Black-headed gulls breed at the flash, but they're clearly not that species. They're a large gull and either lesser black-back or herring gull. My best guess is lesser black-back but I'm not sure that I can be certain.

I'm not sure we can call these flight feathers! I suppose they do the job for very short flights but it's hard to see it getting very far with these. If this bird had flown over my garden on its way to the flash, as many birds do, it sure would have given me palpitations.

Cape Gull, Grafham Water

I broke one of my golden rules today, never go south of the Mersey unless it's into north Cheshire or Wales. 

However some birds do occasionally tempt me to travel south and news of a Cape Gull at Grafham Water in Cambridgeshire was one such bird. It wasn't a promising start though, when John messaged me to give me the breaking news, my initial response was "What the heck is a Cape Gull?". A quick look at the scientific name gave me a clue, Larus dominicanus vetula, it was clearly a race of kelp gull.

I've seen quite a few kelp gulls previously in Australia and New Zealand, but not this race. Cape Gull is the South African race which breeds mainly in the southern hemisphere but which is increasingly common further north and has recently started breeding north of the equator, now as close as Morocco. That last piece of information is an important point that I'll come back to later.

The bird was first identified and news put out yesterday, but photographs have come to light which show that it has been present since at least 2nd August. 

I contacted Ray as soon as I got the news and we made plans to go, but the earliest we could manage was today. This made me a little nervous, because I feared that once the local tips re-opened this morning after the weekend, the bird might change it's routine and disappear during the day and only come back to roost in the evening. That's probably what it would do if it was at Pennington Flash and I really didn't want to be there until dusk to get a silhouetted view in fading light of a bird in the middle of the reservoir. However, if that was how it had to be then so be it, we just had to take our chances or risk missing out on what will undoubtedly be a strong contender for bird of the year.

The Mandarin returns

Hard to believe that these are photos of the same bird just four months apart! The photo below is how this mandarin looked in full breeding plumage at the beginning of April, whilst the photo above is the bird today in eclipse. You can clearly see the purple ring on its left leg in both photos. Today's bird was off the car park at Pennington Flash whilst back back in April I photographed it at Plank Lane marina.

Also today, two common sandpipers at the boat club, and just two common terns.

Bits and bobs at Pennington Flash

Just a trickle of good birds each day to keep me interested at the moment, this morning brought my first juvenile dunlin of the year at the flash.