Saturday 31st October
GREEN(ish) DAY?
After much debate on an interesting pylloscopus warbler on The Lizard, considered to be either a Greenish Warbler or Green Warbler (potential 2nd record for Britain), Russki and I decided to head down first thing on Saturday morning and have a look for ourselves.
The bird showed on and off fairly regularly during the 3 hours that we were there and we had some good scope and bin views low down in good light as well as in the canopy in potentially misleading light. In a nutshell, it was a very interesting bird and certainly to my eye had yellowish tones to the supercilium, neck sides and UT coverts. The bill was very "snouty" looking seeming thick based and long, the upperparts did not strike me as particularly "bright green" seeming rather washed out but nontheless green in colour. A very prominent wing bar was present on the greater coverts with a few pale edges on the median coverts on just one side. The supercilium had an obvious bulge to the supercilium immediately behind the eye and did not appear to meet on the forehead. The overall jizz of the bird was quite distinct in that it seemed quite stout flicking around with continually drooped wings.
The bird was heard to call a few times and was clearly di-syllabic to my ear.
My experience of Green Warbler (aka Bright Green Warbler) is only in Sri Lanka in March and were not great views, but I do remember thinking they seemed quite washed out in appearance - not a great help!
Persistance by a local Cornish birder resulted in a recording being made of the call of the and a sonogram was sent to Magnus Robb on Saturday afternoon who concluded; Greenish Warbler without doubt.
However, it has been suggested that Green Warblers from the Black Sea region are almost inseparable from Greenish Warbler in plumage and although the songs are very different, the call of this population is stated as being clearly di-syllabic as opposed to the tri-syllabic stated in most literature in relation to populations elsewhere in the world.
If you haven't fallen asleep already, see below for more.
See here for more: http://surfbirds.com/forum/showthread.php?t=5983
See some photos taken by Steve Rogers of bird here: http://www.swopticsphoto.com/
Other birds seen on site included Yellow-browed Warbler and Pied Flycatcher.
No time for any puddings I'm afraid - they will be coming soon!
Wise Birding Holidays
Here in Alaska we only have 7 or 8 warbler species. All completely distinct from one another. A few years ago, I went to Southeast Asia where I saw numerous old world warblers. What a nightmare trying to sort them out. It was hopeless. Im also impressed by the effort you Brits put into gull identification. I tend to ignore sub-adult birds, unless they are distinctively marked.
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