It turned out to be the right move to go for a twitching tour in the UK. We were – with a lot of help from UK birders – able to locate all the rare UK visitors that we set out to tick, and then some.
All in all, 14 rare ones in the UK, with Bonapartes’s Gull, Pacific Loon and the Dusky Thrush at the top. Adding some long distance shots of some of the gems.
We were pretty close to the Lady Amherst’s Pheasant site, but we decided to not even attempt the bird. Apparently one male might still exists inside a fenced area, and it’s also supposedly really hard to get to see. Poor bird.
The thrush in Derbyshire has been around for quite some time. When we arrived at the village, there were some depressed birders there that hadn’t seen the bird during the entire day. Not good. Eventually we found it though, among all the Redwing Thrushes. Good thing we had the picture, the local birders didn’t really trust us.
Also – we have had a few questions on weather the Lesser Scaup we ticked wasn’t actually a Greater Scaup. We feel confident it’s a Lesser. I include here an additional picture from the lake which better shows the steeper forehead.
We have also noticed that there is smudge on the right side of our bird, which also shows well on “good” pictures from the lake of the Lesser Scaup there. Hence – the tick stands.
Furthermore, and I don’t think we have officially mentioned this earlier. We’re not following the Netfugl list as we originally stated. At the time, we though that was a good idea, but Björn Andersson from the iGoTerra team convinced us that the IOC is the proper list for us to follow. Quite a few UK birders wondered why we didn’t go for the Hudsonian Whimbrel that we just drove by. That bird is not on the IOC list, it might end up there, but even that seems unlikely, hence we skipped the bird. Same thing with Red Grouse.
Since we’re able to tick sub species in the iGoTerra app (and we do) it’ll be easy to translate our IOC based list to a Netfugl one if we should desire. I’m sure someone will do that. News today was that BOU adapts to the IOC list – so that is indeed good news. The mess with different countries running their own lists is unfortunate.