On the wrong side of the planet ...

Time is not really on my side at the moment due to various ongoing work commitments (the fruits of which should be available to see soon at birdguides.com), but here are a few record shots of the Grey-tailed Tattler that I was fortunate enough to come across in the famous quarry at Cabo da Praia, Terceira, Azores, while leading a tour there last Friday. Unfortunately we only had an hour in the strong mid-afternoon sunshine to watch this East Asian vagrant before our early-evening flight back to São Miguel. This represents the first for the Azores and Portugal as well as being just the fifth for the Western Palearctic.

As and when time allows I hope to feed back a bit more on recent trips to Taiwan and Colombia, as well as the Azores tour.

Grey-tailed Tattler, Cabo da Praia, 7 July 2017

Grey Seal at Hammersmith Bridge

The river was particularly busy with rowing and kayaking crews out in force today. The crowded water, combined with a large volume of Fulham fans walking up to Craven Cottage for their FA Cup tie against Hull, meant the number of birds was well down on what it can be - Teal, for example, were more or less non-existent between Hammersmith Bridge and the football ground.

Most of the gulls were floating around aimlessly overhead - even my bread wasn't enticing them to linger long. Curiously, I noticed the birds suddenly go absolutely mental just upstream from Hammersmith Bridge but nothing big was flying over. The birds were circling low over the water and it was instantly apparent why - a seal's head had popped up mid-channel!

It was a big beast, a male, and looked like a Grey Seal - confirmed by experts on Twitter. It seemed a bit perplexed by the large numbers of rowers going past almost constantly and ended up lingering just downstream of the bridge - it was still there, and showing well, when I came back past the bridge an hour later. It was surfacing about once every five minutes and I managed some decent photos after jumping down from the river wall and sitting by the edge of the water.

Looking at sightings of marine mammals in London on the ZSL website, it seems this isn't quite as unexpected as I'd anticipated. Indeed one individual (possibly the same) was seen as far up the river as Richmond on Saturday.

Otherwise, a couple of NTGG rings were as good as it got - P2MT (4cy) and R5ZT (2cy).

Finland's owls

One of the main attractions for wildlife enthusiasts and photographers visiting Finland is the range of boreal owls that can be seen in the country. In late spring and early summer these birds are breeding, which makes locating them a difficult task. Although it's possible to locate some of the more conspicuous species with a lot of luck and graft, using a local guide is the most sensible option as others such as Great Grey and Tengmalms are otherwise more or less impossible to see. We were indebted to Harri Hölttä for his help in seeing Ural, Tengmalm's and Great Grey Owls around Joensuu; further north we were fortunate enough to locate our own Pygmy and Hawk Owls.

Ural Owl
Single birds seen at two different nestboxes around Joensuu.

Great Grey Owl
Two nests visited (Parikkala and Joensuu), both revealing little more than the head of their respective occupants.

Tengmalm's Owl
A single individual at a nest box west of Joensuu.

Pygmy Owl
A vocal bird showed well to the south of Kajaani in the early hours of 25th.

Hawk Owl
Single individuals seen at two sites to the south of Taivalkoski, one of which proved extremely confiding.

Japan day two: Tokyo

20 December 2015

Unfortunately my 'capsule' was opposite possibly the loudest snorer that I've ever encountered in my life and that, coupled with jet lag, meant that I didn't really sleep all that much overnight and was therefore pretty happy when the clock finally ticked round to 5.30 am.

After a shower I left the hotel and, grabbing breakfast on the way, caught the subway to Meiji Jingū. The park and woodland surrounding the shrine was only completed some 90 years ago but is very well established and a great location for city birding. Not long after arriving and passing through the impressively large Cypress torii (gate) I was enjoying a flock of Dusky Thrushes bathing in a stream as well as my first Varied Tits high in the canopy. Further strolling produced good numbers of the commoner woodland species, including plenty of Oriental Turtle Doves.

The shrine itself was not only beautiful but very peaceful early morning, though this had changed by the time I passed again 90 minutes later. As the name would suggest it is a shrine dedicated to Emperor Meiji and seems extremely popular with both tourists and locals alike.

The more open areas on the north side of the park produced a slightly different selection of species, including my first Bull-headed Shrike and a showy pair of Black-backed Wagtails, one of which posed for photos.

Black-backed Wagtail

A few Spot-billed Ducks were floating inanely on the nearby pond, Pale Thrush was seemingly quite common and I glimpsed a Goshawk flying over. Japanese White-eyes afforded some of the best views I had all trip, though I never managed any pleasing photographs.

Japanese White-eye

With the 9 am opening time approaching, I headed back to the gardens south of the shrine. Not only does this area tend to be quieter (a 500 ¥ entrance fee seems to put the masses off) but the birds here are fed regularly, meaning they're much more confiding. Indeed, the Varied Tits feed out of people's hands while my first Black-faced Buntings fearlessly scrubbed around on the floor to within a few feet.

Black-faced Buntings at Meiji Jingū

Varied Tit - another species I failed to photograph satisfactorily, this being my only decent image

My main target here was Grey Bunting, a species that can be elusive and therefore tricky to catch up with. Various items of gen I'd gleaned suggested that the buntings visit the seed put out for them but that didn't seem to be the case today - just the flock of Black-faced plus a couple of brief Oriental Greenfinches. Wandering around the various trails I eventually found a pair of Grey Buntings feeding in the inflow channel at the east end of the main pond, giving distant (but decent) views just in time for the arrival of Rich and Mick, who'd flown in overnight from Vienna.

Back at the seeded area females of Red-flanked Bluetail and Daurian Redstart appeared before our cue to leave for Haneda airport, where we saw a female Blue Rock Thrush a short while before catching a late afternoon flight to Kagoshima, on the southern island of Kyushu.

Grey-headed Gull, round two

One of the first shots of Sunday, taken very early in the low light and drizzle

The light might not have been particularly good throughout Sunday (it remained overcast with occasional bit of rain throughout the day) but the Grey-headed Gull certainly performed well. So well, in fact, that it far exceeded all expectations and provided a memorable day for myself, Rich Bonser and Mick Southcott (who'd arrived on Saturday evening),

Mick's 'Dungeness tactics' paid dividends as the bird, along with the local Black-headed and Mediterranean Gulls, became ever tamer as the day wore on. We won their trust with a combination of several loaves of bread, popcorn and salami and the result was phenomenal and prolonged views of this African vagrant to within a range of a metre. A few of my favourite shots are shared below, with plenty more on Flickr.

We also had an adult Caspian Gull in the harbour at Bisceglie with two second-winter birds seen at nearby Molfetta harbour. And, with that, it was time to head back to Bari airport for our evening flight back to London. Not a bad way to spend a weekend!

Fifty Shades of Grey

I spent the weekend around the relatively unspectacular Italian town of Bisceglie, where my quarry was the wintering Grey-headed Gull first found nearby in November 2012. The trip proved an overall success, with the two days differing quite considerably in both weather and views of the bird. I've only managed to have a look through Saturday's images so far, some of which are displayed below.

Saturday was glorious - 18 celsius and unbroken winter sunshine resulted in a rather red face! Having flown out the previous evening with Gordon Beck, Ernie Davis and Gary Fennemore, we spent the day at the small freshwater outflow a couple of km to the south of the town where several birders had connected in recent weeks. The bird's appearances here had been somewhat unpredictable - one French birder had waited three days while others had scored within an hour of daybreak on their first morning. As it turned out we struck a happy medium - five hours in and the bird noisily announced itself shortly after mid-day, arriving at the mouth of the outflow from the north-west and proceeding to preen and bathe at a range of around 40 metres.

Grey-headed Gull on the water with its Black-headed brethren

Naturally I introduced a bit of bread and the bird immediately played ball, giving several vocal fly-pasts allowing for a few flight shots to be taken. The bird then spent an hour or so roosting on the far side of the channel before flying off north-west again at around 13:30. Save for a couple of shots of it on the water, all my photos from Saturday are of the bird in flight.

Other birds included one or two Black-necked Grebes offshore, a handful of Sardinian Warblers and Zitting Cisticolas, a pair of Black Redstarts, a noisy flock of ten Monk Parakeets and a Hoopoe.

The real excitement of the day was a speculative check of the town harbour itself late in the afternoon, where we found the Grey-headed roosting on a pontoon among the Black-heads. Immediate suspicions were that this must be where the bird spends at least a significant majority of its time - something that proved to be the case the following morning...

Sussex and Kent

Got out of bed quite late on Saturday, but decided to head down to Hove to meet up with Kit Day and Marc Read for the afternoon. The Grey Phal was absolutely ridiculous - routinely walking within centimetres of the assembled crowd. Given the location, the glorious weather and the bird's absurdly tame nature, it was no great surprise that it attracted large numbers of gawping passers-by: this has to be one of the most-seen Grey Phalaropes of all time! Anyway, with birds like this, the 400mm essentially becomes redundant and I resorted to alternating between my wide angle and Marc's 300mm macro (though some of the shots below are with the 400mm when it became a little more 'distant').

Rich Bonser had joined the fracas by mid-afternoon but, with the sun beginning to sink and shadows lengthening across the paddling pool, we decided to leave the phalarope and head to nearby Shoreham to have a look for the Glaucous Gull. We found it easily enough, but the harbour there is something of a fortress - access to anywhere is pretty much impossible. As such, we had to make do with one close flyover (into the sun!) from the gull before it inexplicably decided to fly out to sea, where we lost it as a dot some way out towards France.

This morning I journeyed across to Ramsgate. A frosty start led to a bright but breezy morning, with the wind presumably accounting for the Hume's Leaf Warbler being so elusive for much of my visit - for the first hour, I only heard it as it kept well hidden in the various evergreen trees within the cemetery. And, after a couple of hours, this was as good as my views had got:

Eventually though, it succumbed to a bit of play-back and went on to perform quite well (albeit generally at the tops of trees) for half an hour or so - given that it couldn't help but call as it moved around, it was easy to keep tabs on.

Grey Phalarope

Grey Phalarope, Salthouse Little Eye, 8th November 2013

I've not actually seen many showy Grey Phalaropes, so a couple of hours spent with this smart first-winter at Salthouse on Friday morning was most welcome. It spent most of the time in the middle of the pool (c.30m range) but occasionally looped by just a few metres away. The weak late autumn sunshine meant the bird was generally side-lit, so pristine photos were difficult to obtain. Considering this, I'm quite pleased with my results.