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MINAHASA HOODED PITTA

A Minahasa Hooded Pitta emerges from an old hard drive, Gunung Tangkoko 2006 (Mike Watson)

AS A BIRDER, if you were only allowed one book, then ‘All the Birds of the World’ by Josep del Hoyo, published by Lynx would be it! I bought a copy during the first pandemic lockdown, with the intention of copying my pal Pete Morris’s idea of adding gold stickers to the birds I’ve seen. Spectrum alert! First of all I would have to figure out which birds I’d seen - I’ve never kept a world life list but I do have all my records consisting of various notebooks and papers so it was a feasible task. Then I would be able to use the iGoTerra list to know which stickers to add to the book. In the end I never got around to this during the pandemic, there were too many other things to do with the extra free time, like birding itself. However, time ticks away and I find myself thinking there’s not so much of it left as there used to be. So, I sat down one day and finished the task of uploading sightings to our favourite listing service iGoTerra, taking until 3am next morning. It’s not that difficult if you just add fast track ticks (my next task is to add the details of the first observations, at least, later) but there’s no way I could remember all those fancy-named hummingbirds and obscure tryant flycatchers (the world’s two largest bird families) so I had to do a lot of checking of notes and paper checklists. Can you imagine how many taxonomic and name changes there have been since my first visit outside the WP in 1990? It’s been great fun reliving past trips and checking how taxonomic changes have affected what I have seen. I reached my favourite bird family, pittas and saw the page in ATBOW almost filled with the new species resulting from the splitting of the Red-bellied complex. Why had we not tried harder to see one on Sulawesi, or Halmahera, or New Britain? Oh dear! Another spectrum alert! I did see one on Batanta island though - now Papuan Pitta - the same species, some of which spend the Austral summer in Australia’s Iron Range.

I fared better with hooded pittas, by chance seeing three out of the new four species. Western Hooded Pitta in Thailand and Eastern Hooded Pitta in PNG and to my surprise, the hooded pitta we saw way back in 2006 on Gunung Tangkoko in Northern Sulawesi is now split as Minahasa Hooded Pitta. I mentioned this to Pete at work, and he hurriedly checked his list to find that he had not seen the former subspecies forsteni! Surprising as there are hardly any birds I’ve seen that he hasn’t among his 9000+, including almost 40 pittas. Even more surprising, there are hardly any records of Minahasa Hooded Pitta on eBird, and no photos. The headline photo is even of some vegetation, from which one was calling by Pam Rasmussen! There are a few scattered records of it all along the octopus tentacle-like Minahasa Peninsula of Northern Sulawesi and I am sure that now it is split as a separate species more effort will be made to look for it.

A little about our encounter on 13 September 2006. Juhász Tibor and Ványi Robi, along with Stuart Warren had arranged to camp on Gunung Tangkoko through local birder Untu Baware, primarily for Scaly-breasted Kingfisher. We saw staggered about three quarters of the way up the mountain and camped overnight, completing the next hour or so to the forested summit before dawn the next morning, where we saw the kingfisher. We descended slowly back to the camp for something to eat around lunchtime, and there was simply a hooded pitta in the forest around the camping area. It was quite obliging and allowed some decent photos but the morning belonged to the kingfisher. Fast forward 18 years to the present day and it seems the morning really belonged to the pitta, although we had no idea of this at the time. Happy memories of an exciting trip to the forest paradise of Indonesia with friends, some of whom are no longer with us - Robi, Kris Tindige and now dear Theo Henoch, who passed away last month. ‘Time is shorter than you think so let’s go’ Nick 13.

All the Birds of the World (which was too early to see the Minahasa Hooded Pitta split)- buy some gold stickers and have some fun!

The dormant volcano, Gunung Tangkoko towers over the surrounding landscape (Ványi Robért)

Scaly-breasted Kingfisher, Gunung Tangkoko (Mike Watson)

Stuart Warren (front), Ványi Robért and Juhász Tibor on Gunung Tangkoko (Mike Watson)

Tropical rainforest on the slopes of Gunung Tangkoko (Mike Watson)

Ványi Robért RIP (Mike Watson)

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WRECKED SEABIRDS IN RIBCHESTER

Pomarine Skua, Red Bank, Ribchester 4 November 2023

4 NOVEMBER and a photo of an adult skua is posted on a Ribchester residents Facebook page! It is apparently on the path between Boat House and Red Bank, my old local patch. I have walked this path hundreds of times! Within minutes Lee Parnell has zoomed along there and confirmed it as a Pomarine Skua! The first ever twitchable in the ELOC area! Sadly it is not in a good state, appearing exhausted. I was there soon afterwards and we figured out what to do. After lots of phone calls, including to a RSPCA inspector who lives in Rib, we were no further forward. No-one cares about wrecked seabirds anymore, maybe owing to the AI risk? So, with no facilities to look after it, we left it to take its chances and it was inevitably found dead next morning. A sad end for a magnificent bird.

Just over a month earlier, on 29 September, Phil Larkin reported a Northern Gannet in his Ribchester garden!!! Another storm-blown seabird and only slightly more regular in East Lancs than the Pom. The gannet’s fate was uncertain, it was captured in Boyce’s Brook and released on the river. It lingered a while but then disappeared. Now this bird had definitely encountered AI, with one balckened iris. Whether or not it was still suffering is not known but its occurrence was following another severe storm so it may have simply been an AI survivor?

Northern Gannet, Greenside, Ribchester 29 September 2023

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RED PHALAROPE IN EAST LANCS

Red Phalarope (first winter), Lower Foulridge Reservoir, East Lancashire

IT’S ONLY TAKEN ME 18 YEARS to catch up with a Red (or Grey) Phalarope in East Lancs! I moved here in 2005, a week after the New Laithe Farm scrapes bird, so I owe the finder of this one, Ian Corbett a big thank you! Apart from a fly-by bird at Stocks I can’t think of another one in the intervening period. I have seen hundreds of them this summer on the Alaskan tundra so it was great to see the next stage of their life cycle, a first winter bird on migration. It has been windy lately, and it is maybe the same weather that brought the American passerines to the west that delivered this lovely little bird to East Lancs. They are often storm-blown inland. It was feeding very actively and interestingly mostly in a tiny inlet on the SE corner of Lower Foulridge Reservoir. Typically ultra tame it walked right past me a few times less than a metre away but it would not do this for the folks standing bolt upright. I can’t understand why birders don’t get this. Or maybe they don’t own a washing machine? Anyway the R5’s flipscreen came into its own again, no need to lie down in the mud anymore.

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BAY-BREASTED & CANADA WARBLERS IN PEMBROKESHIRE

Bay-breasted Warbler, Ramsay Island, Pembrokeshire - only the second British record and the first twitchable!

ANOTHER GRAND DAY OUT TO PEMBROKESHIRE resulted in two UK lifers, Bay-breasted and Canada Warblers. Edging me closer to that magic number! Both are a product of the historic fall of North American passerines brought by Hurricane Lee in midweek. The Bay-breasted Warbler turned up on Ramsay Island on Thursday, while we were watching the Magnolia Warbler but there were no boats until Saturday, so, after a nervous day of waiting, Diedert and I set off again in the middle of the night. The 40 birders on the early morning boat from St Justinian was like a ‘Who’s who’ of British listers (with the exception of us of course!). Some of the guys noticed that a couple of folks came out of the house on the island, looked behind it and then went back in again - surely a sign the bay-breast was still there. They would have been wandering around looking for it otherwise right? After a nice wryneck on the path above the lifeboat station the news came through that the bay-breast was indeed still there. Game on! The locals did a very thorough job of policing the twitch, they had even called in two police officers to keep an eye on us! The warbler was very active indeed on a lovely sunny morning and showed very well to two boat loads at a time, between 40-80 people only! A minute crowd for the first twitchable one in the UK and only the second record here. What a lovely bird it was, with very striking white-edged wing feathers. I heard it call a few times, a very thin robin alarm-like whistle. Every now and again, it would retreat to the shelter of the willows in the garden after touring the tiny valley in which I saw the Indigo Bunting in 1996. Thank you Ramsay Island and all the folks who made the trip possible.

While we were in the boat to Ramsay, we re-entered mobile phone signal and news came through that a Canada Warbler had turned up near the Magnolia! The first UK record no less. Many of the old timers in the boat had seen the Irish bird but it was still a shock nevertheless. I got separated from Diedert as he raced off for the Canada Warbler with Dan but I enjoyed some more views of the bay-breast before the next boatload came over. What a terrific experience! We also saw up to eight choughs, a Peregrine, some Chiffchaffs, Goldcrests and a Blackcap in the vicinity of the garden behind the white house. The wind picked up gradually and I did zip over to Flimston for the Canada Warbler but it was total carnage there, a lovely little dell in the ancient willows around which it frequented, looked like a bison re-introduction scheme after the crowd had thinned out. Although I managed a couple of sightings, one a cracking full view for about 10 seconds, and another bits and pieces including in-flight view (thanks Sam Viles!) it was a really horrible crowd experience, easily my most intense in 42 years of twitching. The irony of enjoying climate change-induced events is not lost on me. We are going to see bigger and more powerful storms crossing the Atlantic as time goes by so the mega chasers will no doubt see more rare birds, as long as their populations hold out.

There is a Bay-breasted Warbler in the distance, behind that white house on Ramsay Island!

Former East Lancs birder Dave Jackson on Ramsay Island

Happy faces on the return to St Justinian

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