Ruffly Remembird

Quick trip out to Barnes today without the boys so time to do some birding -although it's a little late in the day. It's also my first trip with my new toy - a Remembird. I bought this for a number of reasons - partly to improve my bird call skills which are, frankly, a bit erratic. Some days go really well and I can pick up calls from all over the place, then a week later I spend half an hour staring at a bush trying to work out what the hell is making the call. With September here and the rest of the autumn still to come I've decided that I need to both improve and have a way to capturing anything I'm too rubbish to decode. I also quite like the idea of getting a better understanding of calls (and song). I bought the Sound Approach guide about a year ago and have regularly dipped into it and found it really useful to think more about how a call sounds and to understand how its different components (pitch, harmonics, etc) and how these hang together to make up the overall sound of the call. Lastly it should be useful for overseas holidays as it'll help to ward off the feeling that I'm missing a huge number of birds from just being unable to get a grip on unfamiliar calls. While I usually manage to learn some quickly (like Yellow rumped Warblers in the US) I find others stump me competely.

Walking past the bushes around Dulverton hide I picked up the sooeee type call of what I assumed was a juv Chiffchaff. I hit record on the Remembird and got a few recordings - which I'll load up here if they turn out to be usable. Eventually it showed and revealed itself to be a very brown bird with a fairly prominent buffy super, hollow ear coverts, buff flanks, off white underparts and with green wash restricted to inner primaries, inner greater coverts, lower rump, upper tail coverts and tail. While I think it's not that helpful to get caught up in subspecific id when there's loads of overlap and intergrades I thought I would (for fun) try and work out why this could be either a juv collybita or whether there was any reason to think it could be an abietinus. Obviously not one of the grey and white birds but one of the brown and green ones (or tartan ones or whatever colour the different Chiffchaff races are supposed to be this week).

I then realised I had only the vaguest idea on how to age Chiffchaffs so decided to take a few shots to look up in Svensson - following a very speedy phyllosc through dense vegetation with a 400mm lens tested (frankly beat hands down) my camera skills so that I ended up with a couple of pretty poor photos and many more totally useless ones (out of focus, bird not even in shot, etc).

I'll return to this when I've done my homework.



Barnes seemed a bit empty (of birds, not people) with lower duck numbers than usual for this time of year. There were still around 11 Wigeon, 30-odd Shoveler, 40-50 Teal, 5-6 Pochard, c30 Gadwall, c35 Lapwing, c8 House Martin over the site, a burst of song from a Cetti's, a total of c8 Chiffchaffs across the southern half the site, an LBB with a massively deformed bill and a half submerged Heron.

From the Peacock Hide there were more Snipe (for a total of at least 11) and a very smart Ruff (Barnes year tick!).