Great Spotted Woodpecker now a daily visitor to the feeder since we started to put peanuts out. Crap photo on phone taken quickly through a window as as they are very wary of any movement.
I think this one is a male?
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Looks like a juvenile.
Second (or possibly third) calendar year bird.
From the finder’s account (Bob Flood)
In the first moult cycle, juveniles are brown overall and the bill is dark grey. In the second moult cycle, light-morph birds attain a whitish head and body, whitish on the upper forewing and the bill is bluish/pinkish. In the third moult cycle, light-morph birds start to look more like adult birds and the bill is adult-like, being bluish with a pink base. The Scilly bird best fits a light-morph second-cycle bird (Richard Stonier)
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The Guardian gets the pics right (I think) and doesn’t call them Seagulls!
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Back from Spain, saw a few interesting birds (and many dried up wetlands more of which to come ) tricky ID this one but I think it’s right, Spectacled Warbler - in the Cava region above Barcelona
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Never completely straightforward from a single pic but it would be very hard to argue against female Spectacled Warbler.
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About where I landed Paul - had some inconclusive but useful help from Bird Forum, but prob a toss up between this and Sardinian Warbler and pale beak and legs seemed to push it toward Spectacled - good fun seeing and finding out about new birds in a completely different place.
Sardinian doesn’t have the pale eye ring - or spectacles
Yep
Without putting my house on it, I would place a decent bet on adult fem Spectacled.
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Nearly 5 hours of birding today with good numbers of migrants moving through. 8 Pied Flycatchers (3 of which were in my garden) 10+ Willow Warblers, 2 Garden Warblers, Grey Plover, 3 Winchats, a few Chiffchaffs, Whitethroat, Lesser Whitethroat and a Wood Pigeon (a scarce bird here)
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This is sat ripping some carcass to pieces at work. Oblivious to any human.
It has a bell so I expect pest control? Size of a small dog!
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Gyr Falcon
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Thought that from google.
Can’t be wild. It was tame to the point of being worrying.
The first pic is a Lanner Falcon which I watched flown in a country show near Henley today - super fast Peregrine-like hunter. An amazing thing happened; the bird flew out several times and then on its last flight flew into and through the whole of the marquee behind which was full of people and stalls, (second pic) then out the side and into the falconer to catch the bait. The falconer was genuinely gobsmacked and said he’d never seen anything like it before, and quite frankly it was just astonishing -the calculating speed of the brains of these birds is off the scale.
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