We strung our Rüppel’s Vulture in Spain. Apparently, according to Dick Forsman we’re not the first to do so. Quite a few experienced Spanish birders, familiar with dark Griffons Vulture told us that our photo was indeed a Griffon Vulture, not a Rüppels.
We’re still struggling though, to find a picture of a Griffon Vulture on the internet that looks as our bird. So, that was backstep #1.
Backstep #2 is the American Herring Gull we twitched in Southern Portugal. There has been quite a lot of discussions on the Internet on that bird, including the famous two-bird-theory which was effectively disproven by Yoav Perlman in a facebook post where he showed that the bird that was originally identified as an AMHG was indeed the same bird that later in the spring developed an orbital ring and started to look like a Yellow-legged Gull. Discussions are still ongoing, but for now we step back on the bird.
Upstep. This weekend we gave a talk on Falsterbo Birdshow, as we get out from the talk, there is a brand new alarm on Swedish BA for Baird’s Sandpiper on Öland. We skip the (probably very nice) dinner, go to Öland together with Anton Castelius and Eric Sandelin and twitch successfully.
