Wednesday April 19 - tricky stuff

The wind continues to blow from the east, but less fiercely. Today was a much better day.

To begin with there was news of an adult Little Gull and an Arctic Tern at Earlswood, so that was to be the destination. The great thing about these mini-twitches is that you get to see plenty other birders and often a smattering of old friends. I arrived to find John S and Paul on the causeway, and later on got chatting to Mike Inskip before other familiar faces turned up on the twitching trail.

Although John put me onto the Arctic Tern in his scope, it was miles away so after getting reasonable views of the Little Gull, I set off to try getting closer. A certain amount of confusion was caused by other Commic Terns and my own view was that we ended up with four Common Terns, and just one Arctic Tern. I should say that one of the Commons was quite Arctic-like, with a long tail and limited grey on the outer wing, and there was a school of thought that there were actually two Arctics present. All very tricky.

Little Gull with Black-headed Gull in hot pursuit

The undisputed Arctic Tern

Talking of tricky stuff, there were some interesting developments at Morton Bagot overnight. The "bright" Wheatears seen yesterday had been destined to remain just that, even though I was wondering whether they could have been of the Greenland race.

This morning Tony let me know he had caught four Wheatears using his thermal imaging kit and a big anglers net on a long pole. So that was all four I had seen yesterday. I rang him to ask what the wing measurements were. This was an opportunity to finally nail a definite Greenland Wheatear on biometrics.

Tony kindly sent me the following wing lengths: 100mm, 103mm, 103.5mm, and 104mm. A look at BWP confirmed that the three largest were definitely outside the range of "British" Northern Wheatear. He also sent some photos.

Greenland Wheatear - per Tony K

Greenland Wheatear - per Tony K

It strikes me that technology (the thermal imaging monocular) could revolutionise the status of Greenland Wheatear. I suspect that a large number of the passage Wheatears in the Midlands from mid April or even earlier will turn out to be Greenland bound.