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Wednesday 13 April 2011

Titchwell Chiffchaff

Compared to the previous few days, the last week has been a relatively quiet affair on the patch with no new migrants for the year noted, although there has been a notable arrival of Willow Warblers and Blackcaps plus the odd Wheatear and good numbers of hirundines moving through.

On the Butterfly front, the first Orange-tips and Holly Blues have been noted.

The most frustrating episode of the past week has to be whilst on a visit to Titchwell yesterday when a chiffchaff sp. was heard singing some way infront along the meadow trail. My initial thought was surely thats going to be an Iberian but before I could get near to where the song was coming from it annoyingly stopped singing. With no further sound of it and managing to convince myself that I wasn't entirely sure if I could actually recall what Iberian sounded like anyway plus being aware that 'mixed singers' had been recorded on a number of occasions I put it down to the latter, although I did mention its presence to another birder I spoke to along the path. With a brief listen on the way back drawing a blank and time pressing I left it at that and with it mostly forgotten I stupidly failed to check the song when I got home.

Anyway of course one of the first messages that came up on the pager this morning was 'Iberian Chiffchaff @ Titchwell - singing on the meadow trail'!!! Checking sound recordings on the web tonight the song heard matches those of recordings of apparent vagrant Iberians so I'm happy with that, but just annoyed that I didn't trust my instincts a bit more - lesson learnt for the future!