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MAGNOLIA WARBLER AT ST GOVAN'S HEAD

Magnolia Warbler, St Govan’s Head, Pembrokeshire

WE HAD A SWEEPSTAKE IN THE OFFICE A COUPLE OF DAYS AGO, I CHOSE MAGNOLIA WARBLER AS THE NEXT NEW FOR AUTUMN 2023 MEGA but after a day I thought this was a ridiculous choice so I think I changed it to nighthawk or something. I should have stuck with it, as this morning I was watching the little cracker on Trevallen Downs, St Govan’s Head in lovely Pembrokeshire! Easy to see but surprisingly difficult to see well, it was several hours before I got a nice close view like the one above. It was mostly parts of the bird as it flitted around in fairly deep cover in bushes in a way not dissimilar to how Pallas’s Warbler can disappear into bare hawthorns. As the third UK record and the first on the mainland it drew a big crowd, with lots of familiar faces, only we all look like old people now! There was a steady passage of hirundines, mostly swallows, and Meadow Pipits and Sky Larks overhead but the bushes frequented by the Magnolia Warbler were rather quiet, with only a couple of Chiffchaffs, Blackcaps and a Sedge Warbler of note on a lovely sunny day, after the early showers had passed through. A Clouded Yellow butterfly also skipped by as we were watching the Magnolia. Almost 10 years ago to the day I was watching Magnolia Warblers at Magee Marsh in Ohio, this is one of the earlier migrating wood warblers after all. The past two days have probably seen the biggest arrival of Nearctic passerines ever recorded in the UK and in Pembrokeshire alone there are Bay-breasted and Black-and-white Warblers, Bobolink and a likely Alder Flycatcher in addition to the Magnolia. It is all the result of an unusually large, fast moving warm front crossing the Atlantic giving these birds a ride. Edenwatcher on birdforum.neet made a good comment ‘There is nothing unlikely about being swept up in a weather event. It happens to millions of birds every autumn. What is unlikely is multiple American passerines leaping off a flurry of ships across the length of the west of Britain and Ireland within a 24 hour period associated with perfect conditions to lead to their natural arrival, Rob’. Thanks to Diedert for driving today!

Excellent Twitter post by Peter Stronach

Magnolia Warbler, Magee Marsh, Ohio, 19 September 2013

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BROWN BOOBY AT TEESMOUTH

Who would have thought this possible 40 years ago? A Brown Booby with Hartlepool Headland in the background.

With the number of UK records of Brown Booby increasing (well into the teens now and maybe involving more than 10 individual birds) I could wait until one came a bit closer than Cornwall. Eventually it was too much to resist one at my old stomping ground Teesmouth (and also this one belongs to the Atlantic subspecies, which I hadn’t seen yet). Rather than just a booby sat on a buoy as so many of my sightings around the world have been it was great to see it bombing around the river mouth, viewed from the South Gare, joining feeding frenzies of gulls, cormorants and some of the hundreds of young auks (Razorbills and guillemots) also here. I guess that’s why it is hanging around. It fed by snorkelling and then dipping its head in the water, coming up with small fish numerous times, while flapping its wings around. Luckily the biblical deluge to the north did not reach us and we were able to drive home with ease, after a great fish and chips at Seabreeze in Redcar! That was about it.

Brown Booby passing the North Gare - site of Britain’s first Sooty Shearwater record in 1828!

Looking towards Seal Sands at high tide

South Gare harbour fishing boats

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SPECTACLED EIDER IN ALASKA

Spectacled Eider. I knew when I took the frames in this sequence that this was going to be my favourite moment on my recent Wild Images Wild Alaska Bird Photography tour. This photo was taken at around 2am when the sun reappeared between cloud banks to the west and turned the tundra pools to gold - one of my favourite birding experiences so far! (Mike Watson)

Spectacled Eider is essentially a Siberian breeding bird, nesting in the Yana, Indigirka and Kolyma River deltas, with outposts on the tundra of Alaska’s North Slope and Yukon Delta. It's a bird I had wanted to see since I was a child. Heinzel, Fitter and Parslow's 'The Birds of Britain and Europe' published by Collins described it as a 'rare winter visitor to the coasts of N Russia and Arctic Norway' so it remained a distant dream. Many years later I had tea on a lawn in Cambridgeshire, with John Parslow, who had turned out to be a neighbour of one of my customers when I was manager of NatWest Bank’s now-closed Royston branch. It’s a small world.

 

My first encounter with the eider was not really what I was expecting, and it started with another small world encounter. I was writing some details of the Grizzly Bear we had seen that morning in the log at the reception of the Aurora Inn in Nome and someone stood next to me, checking in at the counter there. ‘Your name please’ said the lady at the counter. ‘Ron Johns’ said the chap next to me. What a lovely surprise! I swung round, but I hadn’t seen Ron for around 30 years, since I used to spend a lot of time at Cley-next-the-sea in Norfolk. I guess we have both changed a lot in that time and he probably didn’t recognise me either, as the kid lister who used to hang around with Richard Webb. I’m 57 now and he’s turned 80. We chatted briefly and went to evening meal.

 

We met again afterwards, but all of my Wild Images photography group were done in after a series of long days in the field, so they went straight to bed. However, the sun was still shining so off I went with Ron and his wife Sue in convoy to check Cape Nome. The cape itself was quiet except for a few Harlequins and distant scoters among the ice floes drifting quietly by but we could see there were more eiders scattered on the sea to the east. At least the infernal construction traffic rebuilding the sea defences had stopped for the evening. There were also several vans parked up in the distance with birders and scopes set up. This must be where the action was, so I rolled up and who else, but the seemingly omnipresent Tom Johnson was there with his Field Guides group and bingo! He showed me my first Spectacled Eider! Thanks Tom! I was quickly able to pass the baton to Ron, who at least had a scope (mine was still somewhere in the world of lost airline baggage) – it’s not every day that you get to show the UK’s most famous twitcher a world lifer! If you want to read more about Ron’s early birding career, he features heavily in Mark Cocker’s definitive book ‘Birders Tales of a Tribe’. Ron was a true pioneer of twitching and was always one of the nicest people on the scene back in the day, when we would whisper to each other ‘there’s Ron Johns!’.

 

The eiders were two drakes and a female, a dream come true from the 1970s and we watched them for a while, gently bobbing up and down in the relatively calm sea just off the beach. Tom hurried off with his group, no time to talk as they had a lot of good birds to catch up with and Ron and Sue also headed off. I went for a walk along the beach in the evening sunshine looking for a pebble to mark the occasion. I am a bit nuts and collect pebbles. There were some lovely small, smooth and rounded quartz pebbles and eventually I settled on one for my bookshelves that looks a bit like the round white spectacle on the eider’s head. Fast forward to the time of writing and the pebble I chose now also marks the last time I would see dear Tom, so it’s taken on an even more special significance. I do not label pebbles, and they all end up mixed on my bookcases so I can only recall where I found a few special ones. I’m not going to let this one go into the mix of the pebble bookcase beach so easily.

 

Spectacled Eider & Common Eider, Cape Nome (Mike Watson)

The Spectacled Eiders remained distant and only identifiable if I took a photo and zoomed in to a few pixels on the b.o.c. but, after a short while, they rather serendipitously hopped onto an ice floe with some Common Eiders, which was floating closer to shore, towards the rocks of the cape. I was able to whizz along the coast road and clamber down to the water’s edge (not something I’d do with a group!) to take a few photos of them at least at a more acceptable range. I searched for them with the group the following day, but they were gone. No stress though, the Spectacled Eider experience would just have to wait until we reached Utqiagvík.

 

Flying north, two days later, we passed icing sugar-like snow-clad Denali, the green forests of the Yukon Valley and then the sharp peaks of the Brooks Range before the landscape turned brown over the tundra of the North Slope. At least one million lakes were interspersed by pingos and untamed meandering rivers, complete with zillions of ox-bow lakes and traces thereof. The lakes were mostly frozen with just the slimmest dark blue outlines where the water had started to melt.

Flying over the Utqiagvík tundra landscape (Mike Watson)

 

There is nothing like experiencing the tundra pools of the North Slope in spring. There are simply birds everywhere! We started our exploration of this special area along the strangely named Cake Eater Road (a derogatory term for wealthy people) and then out into the gas field. Utqiagvík (formerly Barrow) is not a wilderness experience but there isn’t a more accessible place like it in the world for the sheer spectacle of tundra birds. It is a true world birding hotspot/Mecca. It was so strange to ignore hundreds of Red Phalaropes, a bird I normally spend hours looking for in Iceland and Svalbard, in favour of the even bigger prizes. The first eiders we spotted from the road was a pair of spectacular Spectacled Eiders, not far away in a partly frozen pool, which added another dimension to the background. Within a couple of days of warmer temperatures, the ice was gone and with the warmer temperatures came an infuriating heat shimmer.

Spectacled Eider pair (Mike Watson)

 

Those who stayed up past midnight witnessed something very special. We could see it happening while we were exploring back at the coast. The sun was going to reappear from behind clouds to the west at a ridiculously low angle and we hurried to the tundra pools. The pair of Spectacled Eiders was still in the same spot, and we were able to enjoy the most incredible light show as the tundra glowed in the golden sunlight. Although we tried to recreate this moment on subsequent days, banks of cloud to the west meant it did not happen again.

Spectacled Eider drake, Utqiagvík (Mike Watson)

 

Apart from spending a lot of time resting, we noticed some interesting eider behaviour. At first, the male of the pair seemed more nervous than the female, which was rather unconcerned. After spending a while photographing them in the myriad shallow tundra pools, another male appeared and caused quite a stir. The usurper was eventually seen off and things returned to normal. Sometime afterwards a lone female joined the pair, and she too was seen off but after this event, the original female became much more nervous, ushering her male away from us and they disappeared out of sight onto some more distant pools.

Spectacled Eider tension, their seaweed-like green crests flared, Utqiagvík (Mike Watson)

 

The show was not quite over yet, after turning in, I looked out of my hotel room window at just before 4am and there, on the ice, just off the beach was a huge Polar Bear! Joined for a while by another, eating whale meat put out by local people, it was still present at 7.45am for those heading to breakfast. What a day and a bit it had been at the top of the world. We enjoyed some more encounters in the following days with the best eider, but we now had other fish to fry.

Polar Bear on the beach off Stevenson Street, Utqiagvík at 4am when no-one else is around (Mike Watson)

 

There is something else really fascinating about Spectacled Eider. In 1988 the late great Steve Madge wrote in his Helm masterpiece ‘Wildfowl an identification guide’ that ‘its winter grounds remain a mystery’ and he went on to say ‘There are few sightings of numbers at the time of post-breeding moult or in winter quarters, suggesting that very large numbers must be present at these times in a relatively small area far offshore, probably around edges of pack ice in Bering Sea though this remains unproven’. He was spot on! Not long after he wrote this, the wintering grounds were indeed discovered, out in the Bering Sea to the southwest of St Lawrence Island in polynyas, which are small unfrozen areas of water surrounded by sea ice. I recall seeing a photo of thousands of eiders dotted in a large polynya, when news of the discovery was first published in 1996.

Spectacled Eider drake (Mike Watson)

 

Spectacled Eider used to be much more common than it is now. For instance, in the Yukon Delta the 1970s population of 47,740 pairs decreased to a mere 1,721 by 1992! The main reason for this catastrophic decline was cited as lead poisoning, from shot pellets that had accumulated in pond sediments on their breeding tundra after a century of intensive hunting. The eiders accidentally ingest the pellets while foraging on the bottom of tundra pools.

 

Now the poor eiders must contend with the effects of climate change as well. The recent warming of the Bering Sea has allowed more pelagic fish to move into the eider’s wintering grounds and compete for food. An additional threat comes in the form of predators such as Glaucous Gulls and Ravens, which take advantage of the oil and gas industries’ infrastructure, such as pipelines and electricity poles. Arctic Fox, another major predator, has also benefitted in some areas where human activity has helped it survive through access to shelter and food garbage. Like it or not, the Utqiagvík policy of shooting foxes on sight must be helping the beleaguered eiders.

Spectacled Eider drake, Utqiagvík (Mike Watson)

 

Spectacled Eider is ‘only’ considered to be ‘Near Threatened’ by BirdLife International but their species summary hints that this status may not be up-to-date and that it might be declining at a faster rate, which would cause its status to be up-listed (or should that be down-listed?). I can’t imagine there is any good news in store for its prospects and eider numbers seemed to be down at Utqiagvík generally this year so, once again, it is a bird to see sooner rather than later! See you next time in Utqiagvík?

 

One final thing. Can you believe there is someone who saw the eiders ‘the wrong way round’? That is, in the order of Spectacled, King, Steller’s and then lastly Common. Well one of my Birdquest clients, with a life list way over 8000 species, admitted to that, having done almost zero birding in the UK. Funnily enough, this is exactly the order in which we saw them at Utqiagvík as well.

Midnight sun over tundra pools at Utqiagvík (Mike Watson)

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THREE-IN-A-DAY

White-winged Scoter, off Dunbarnie Links, Largo Bay (Mike Watson)

THIS HADN’T HAPPENED FOR ALMOST 40 YEARS! The last time I saw three new birds for the UK in one day was on 12 October 1985 - the Scilly autumn that was - both cuckoos and a grosbeak. OK that line-up will take some beating but today’s treble was still pretty exciting even though it was set up nicely in advance and wasn’t a spur of the moment one-day-only event, with all three quite long-staying, two megas and one much softer one.

Mark Varley and I met at Diedert’s place in Dunsop Bridge at 1am. Bowland has a clear night sky compared to the bright lights of the Ribble Valley! One Barn Owl on the way too. Then it was down to the serious business of getting to Scotland. Dunsop is almost exactly at the geographical centre of the UK but twitching from here is made more difficult by the winding road over the Trough of Bowland to the northbound M6. Despite the early start it’s always easier on the outbound isn’t it? Especially if you had a few hours sleep. There was a surprising number of trucks on the move in the middle of the night though.

We made quick progress to Lower Largo, by which time it was already ‘birding light’ and we could see the gathering of scoters 2km away to the east off Dunbarnie Links. Diedert got a text from Dan at 1am that there had been a sighting of the Stejneger’s Scoter at 8pm by John Nadin the previous evening. This hadn’t made it to the national news networks yesterday and we had been a bit nervous that there was no update since 7am the previous day. It felt further than 2km, Mark carrying two tripods and the 500. Fortunately one of the American White-winged Scoters was one of the closest birds off the pill boxes on the links in lovely early morning light. We were able to study it very nicely - the pink bill making it easy to pick out but the first thing that struck me wasn’t the bill colour, it was the large white Nike tick under its eye and the big-headed look. OK this wasn’t really the lifer that made us move today but it was good to catch up with one in the UK at long last. I’d been saving it. We could see some other interesting things about it, like how you can see daylight through the large nostril when it is side-on and that the nostril and bill bulge change shape as it breathes. What an awesome-looking creature! After much scanning of the widely-spread scoter flock, about 500 in all, we saw the second drake white-winger and were able to switch scopes quickly, seeing both within a couple of seconds.

Spot the white-winger! (MIke Watson)

We continued scanning the many Common and Velvet Scoters but there was nothing rarer among them than a breeding plumage Red-necked Grebe, some Red-throated Loons, Razorbills, Long-tailed Ducks and Red-breasted Mergansers. We walked a little further along the links to keep the sun behind us but then Diedert got a message that the Stejneger’s was showing so it was back along to where the other birders had now gathered. Mike Hunter did a great job of picking it out. Surely we didn’t overlook it unless it had been sleeping or diving? It was instantly distinctive, with a long evenly sloping forehead like an eider and a much bigger nostril bulge. The light was much harsher now and all the birds appeared virtually black-and-white but nevertheless there it was, two down, one to go.

Stejneger’s Scoter - just check that head profile, even when only a handful of pixels! (Mike Watson)

Diedert Koppenol, thanks for doing the driving pal

Mark Varley and scoter watchers (Mike Watson)

Still the best scoter illustration, Ian Lewington’s awesome plate in Martin Garner’s ‘Birding Frontiers’

There was another lifer for both Diedert and Mark within just over an hour’s drive away, Ring-billed Gull in pretty Glen Turret. Was it still there as it hadn’t been reported for a few days. The answer was yes, probably. After three cuckoos, Grey Wagtail and Red Grouse this became a definite yes. In fact it had a mate, a Common Gull, in tow. The views were pretty awesome! A couple of ravens and a Peregrine were overhead. We hadn’t realised the significance of the glen we were in either, home to Scotland’s oldest whisky distillery no less. We had a good look there too!

Ring-billed and Common Gulls, there’s something happening here (Mike Watson)

There was still the small matter of a drake Hooded Merganser at Whinfell Tarn in Cumbria! We could stay awake long enough to get there on the way home to Lancashire. It was in the company of two Tufted Ducks at the peculiar little private lake. Unringed, right side of the country, good arrival date for reorientating American ducks etc. So there it was, three-in-a-day! Just don’t stay too long please.

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