Røst day 4

Day 3 can only be described as bad. It had clouded over during the night but the cloud was high up and there was no rain. No new birds seemed to have arrived and others had definitely moved on so. A skulky Dunnock was the only excitement I had and I spent much of my time reading the messages that kept coming in of amazing birds on Utsira (where quite a few Oslo birders, if not The Oslo Birder 😉, are at the moment) Grey-cheeked Thrush and Red-eyed Vireo from the west and a Raddes Warbler from the east were birds I would have liked to see on Røst….

I used the thermal imager a bit and found a single Jack Snipe and 2 rats…

I have about an hour of birding tomorrow before catching the ferry back to Bodø. A lot can happen in an hour…(or not).

Today’s eBird checklist can be seen here.

Brown Rat with a well patterned face

Spot the Jack Snipe (kvartbekkasin)

I got some better pictures of the Taiga Bean Goose

A flock of Pink-footed Geese (kortnebbgås) dropped in

Jacky

Northern lights last night

Another rat

Chiffchaff (gransanger) was the only warbler today

This male Redpoll has a small bill but must be a Common (gråsisik)

It is not often I take pictures of Raven but they are very bold here

Plastic

The Pintail x Mallrd hybrid showed a bit better today with a single Pintail

Orangey legs

Green speculum

Røst day 3

Cloudless blue skies and a fresh easterly wind meant as expected a bit of a clear out with no new arrivals except perhaps for a small increase in Redwings.

My undoubted highlight was getting even better views of an adult Gyr Falcon than yesterday. It appeared to be a different, larger bird and it is unusual to see adults out on the coast. Normally young birds move to the coast whilst the adults remain close to their breeding territories.

As a sign of how quiet things were the other highlights were a hybrid duck and a plastic duck. A female Pintail x Mallard hybrid was a first for me but seemed to be a quite obvious hybrid between these two species even though female hybrids are much more difficult to identify than males. The plastic duck was a male Mandarin. I could try to argue that it was shy and if a Two-barred Greenish can turn up here then surely a wild duck from China can but it has been around for ages…☺️

Today’s eBird checklist can be seen here.

Tomorrow is forecast to be cloudy with possibly some drizzle which should mean new, and hopefully exciting, arrivals.

Adult Gyr Falcon (jaktfalk)

And the smallest falcon - a Merlin (dvergfalk) chasing a Hooded Crow

Young Peregrine (vandrefalk) chasing a Ruff (brushane)

Female Pintail x Mallrd hybrid (stjertand x stokkand) with a female Pintail

The hybrid at the bottom with an upperwing looking very like a Pintail

The head pattern, leg colour, tertials and tail resemble Mallard but the rest is more Pintail

A poor photo but the green of the speculum can be seen

Male Mandarin coming out of eclipse plumage

Golden Plovers (heilo) here are tame and also garden birds

The Taiga Bean Goose 

Twite (bergirisk)

Snow Bunting (snøspurv)

Arctic Redpoll (polarsisik)

I cycled a lot today and only clocked up 11663 steps

Pintard

On Friday I received some pictures from SteinarAndersen asking for confirmation as to what type of bread eating hybrid duck he had found in suburban Oslo. It is not always easy to work out the parents of hybrids with the Wigeon x Mallard hybrid at Østensjøvannet being a difficult combo (see picture in previous post) but this particular hybrid was a clear 50:50 mixture of its parents: it was a Pintard – Pintail x Mallard (in Norwegian a Stjokkand – stjertand x stokkand).

The head, neck, tail and bill showed the clear influence of the Pintail while the body was Mallard.

I visited the bird yesterday and found it easily where a smelly, dirty stream plunged out of pipe and people clearly fed this bird and the 30 or so Mallards it kept company with.

I found another male of this hybrid combo in early2019 but that bird later suffered the ignominy of being blinged whereas this bird was blingless so is presumably a new bird (bling can fall off). A female Pintail spent 5? winters at Østensjøvannet (although has not returned this winter) and it tempting to think that these hybrids are the result of her pairing with one of the male Mallards that often showed her attention.

Pintail x Mallard hybrid (stjertand x stokkand)