Monday, June 11, 2012

Our recent good run of birds continued this morning as we reached the Narrows. A stunning male Yellow Wagtail with black ear coverts, a blue grey crown, long white supercilium and mainly yellow throat. Mr. Stansfield muted 'dombrowskii' as a good candidate and this feldegg x flava intergrade certainly looks like a good possibility. However these seem to be indistinguishable from the dark ear coverts form of tschutschensis Eastern Yellow Wagtail, at least in appearance. However the call seemed as flava, not the buzzy Citrine Wagtail type call associated with tschutschensis. So dombrowskii is the more likely, but we'll probably never know quite what he is, but he's a cracker none the less. 

A rather flighty little fellow, we later found him half a mile to the North of the Narrows feeding around the cattle troughs. Incidentally Tschutschensis refers to the Chukhotski Peninsula in Siberia. (c) Richard Brown

1 comment:

  1. Cool bird, and one that reminds me of a very similar 'dombrowski'-like bird I saw in Sicily this spring, and that I recently blogged about: http://gobirdingeu.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/confusing-yellow-wagtails-part-2.html

    ReplyDelete