A day at the Races

1 January 2012

And what a lovely day to start the New Year. I didn't open the shop today ( the one stop nature shop - Burnham Deepdale ) and had the morning out birding..... and it was all about races.

First stop was the Fakenham Great Grey Shrike. First thought to be an intergarde of the nominate race excubitor and homeyeri, the South East Russian / Siberian race. Just a few people watching it as I arrived and it was a long way off. Good scope views once it moved from the tops of the trees, but no good for any decent pics so a few record shots taken. It was a very pale bird, with clean pale grey underparts and a large pale white area arounds the scapulars. There was a very large rectangular patch on the primaries, much bigger than normal Great Grey and a second wing patch on the closed wing. This seem pretty continuous when it flew, but really difficult to see due to distance.

 Here it shows the pale scapular area, double wing patches, white tips to tertials and clean pale underparts.

White forehead line which did have a hint of brown above in some light. I only saw it fly properly once and there was a lot of white in the outer tail feathers. The powers that be are discussing this bird and there is a view that it may be homeyeri and that this may even be lumped with Steppe Grey Shrike. I think that's what's happening anyway.

But all in all a very interesting couple of hours watching a difficult to nail race of Great Grey Shrike. I learnt lots.

So moving on to Titchwell RSPB and it was races again as an Coues' Arctic Redpoll of the race exilipes apparently pronounced cowes (that's the coues bit not exilipes). This I only found out having called it all sorts of things at the site, including bloody awkward to see, but it did keep re appearing every fifteen minutes or so and eventually showed well. This race, can be really strikingly white (last one I saw was), but this bird wasn't a real stonker, however it did have a very fat looking neck (probably a better way to describe that), and very obvious white tramlines and a unstreaked white rump. It very obligingly kept feeding on the Alders, hanging upside down so showed it's under tail converts and when viewed in the scope on the third showing, I could just make out the single dark shaft streak on one of the coverts. Nailed.
Also present were two Mealy Redpolls and at least eight Lesser Redpolls. Great fun.

A Greenland White-fronted Goose and Yellow-legged Gull increased the race total and I would like to think had me well passed the winning post, thanks to a lot of help with the Shrike from others, whatever it is.