Rare Bird Alert weekly round-up: 10 - 16 October 2012

The week's highlights:
Ireland’s first South Polar Skua flies by the Cork coast
Shetland’s autumn list now includes Foula’s Eyebrowed Thrush
Eastern Olivaceous Warbler arrives in Fife along with a Pechora Pipit
Barra boys land a White’s Thrush
Scilly birders finally get Nearctic vagrants Blackpoll Warbler & Solitary Sandpiper
The fourth mainland Pallas’s Grasshopper Warbler of the autumn arrives in Co. Durham
Tacumshin’s juvenile Northern Harrier in situ at the start of the week
Kerry holds on to the week’s only American Buff-bellied Pipit

Another glittering set of prizes for the rarity hunter this week as yet another set of high quality birds made themselves known ~ smiles all round on Scilly as birders there finally got a piece of the autumn action while birders in the northeast and the Northern Isles were licking their collective lips as some enticing southeasterlies kicked in as the weekend approached.

Initially it was, however, an Atlantic influence in the weather that provided the autumnal shot-in-the-arm for birders in the far southwest but as the low pressure slipped away it let in a hefty blast of winds that were just made for birders from Spurn northwards.

But it wasn’t a wader or a warbler that were at the forefront of the rarity race. That accolade went to a seemingly forgotten seabird…

Headline birds
It’s hard to imagine that any other week this year would have been able to live up to the sumptuous feast of outstanding species reported upon last week but, fair’s fair, there was a more than decent effort brought up t0 the rare-seekers table over the course of the last seven days.

Top of the pile has to be the pale South Polar Skua watched heading past Mizen Head (Co. Cork) during the morning of 12th which, if accepted, will be a long anticipated first for Ireland (Britain, of course, still awaits its first acceptable record).

Finder Owen Foley takes up the story...


Every year for the past five years I, my brother and father have worked the Mizen Head area for migrants, for a period of 1-2 weeks in October. This has often varied in success, with some years having bumper crops of rarities and some, like this year, having very little in terms of migrants.

Having had a couple of very quiet days, with little more than one or two Yellow-browed Warblers lingering on the head, my brother and father were being tempted off to County Kerry, for long staying Buff Bellied Pipit and Surf Scoters.

Not leaving the house quietly, I was awake at 06.30 and had a leisurely breakfast. However, by the time the light came up, I was bored of Sky News and took off for the last garden on the Mizen Road.

It was a bit too cold for much activity in there, so I carried on to the lighthouse car park to see if there was any activity at sea. Seawatching from Mizen in October is not like seawatching elsewhere at this time of year. There are often large numbers of whales and dolphins in the area, and these often bring with them large numbers of Sooty Shearwaters which linger ~ previous autumns having produced flocks of several thousand following Minke Whales.

Looking with binoculars I could easily pick up Sooty Shearwaters moving west, and having found a Fea’s Petrel some days before in similar conditions (which was a tick for my brother), I grabbed my scope and set off for the cliff edge. The elevation was good, as was the light, and birds were moving by quite close. A large feeding flock of Gannets and Kittiwakes were just off shore to my right, with several Sooty Shearwaters milling around in the fray with them. Two Bonxies were causing havoc in the melee, and birds were drifting in from the east to join them. At about 9 a.m., I picked up an extremely pale bird, close in (about ¼ the way out), out to my left. It was instantly recognizable as “not your average Skua”, to say the least!

Strikingly ice cold, white-grey on the head, and underparts with a smooth, “smoky” quality, it contrasted strongly with jet black underwings. The upperwings too, were solidly dark on all the coverts, and the darkness of the wings in general, seemed to make the white flash on the primaries all the more brilliant. The tail, rump and mantle were all dark, contrasting with the pale nape. The bill was thick and seemed evenly bulbous, giving the bird an almost comical expression, like the bill did not quite belong. The face was also pretty much evenly pale, lending the bird a further “kind” and open look to it. A hint of a white “blaze” just behind the bill was visible, but in good light, was contrasting little with the rest of the bird’s plumage. This was surely a bird that belonged on Antarctic Ice Floes?

Jizz wise the bird did seem slightly sleeker than Bonxie, however, whether this was an effect caused by the smooth plumage and the way light played on it I cannot say for certain. During the five minutes it was passing, it was on view with a Bonxie sadly for only a brief second (though there had been Bonxies much further out in the background at times), so a prolonged comparison of structure could not be made. However with such a distinct plumage it made little difference to the ID process.

After the bird was lost to view, I blinked for the first time in what felt like an eternity and I rapidly made my way back to the car and poured over the field guides I had to hand to cement my thoughts.

Without a doubt a pale phase South Polar Skua. I managed to text the news out (phone signal is always patchy and random on Mizen) and the news was quickly disseminated on the Cork Twitter feed. With the temperature rising, I resumed birding the various gardens during the day, but to be honest, was not much use...I was looking forward to a beer too much!

South Polar Skua is a species which has been, for almost two decades, almost a forgotten item in terms of British and Irish claims ~ the intoxicating world of Pterodroma and Fregata petrel species, and Yelkouan and Scopoli’s Shearwaters have captured many a seabirder’s imagination ~ and as we know they have manifested themselves to a lucky (often extremely persistent) number of seawatchers over the time that it has taken South Polar Skua to slip silently away off the radar.

In one of those beloved birding coincidences, it was 30 years to the very week that seabird guru Peter Harrison made the audacious first claim of seeing a South Polar Skua on a seawatch off St. Ives Island, not once but twice within a week (on 14th and then 18th of October 1982). He promptly illustrated them, beautifully, in the following year’s Cornish Bird Report.

It was all to no avail though despite, literally, being the man who wrote the book, Harrison’s birds were consigned to the BBRC “rejected” bin (no shilly-shallying with a “Not Proven” comfy sidestep in those days) but the two records certainly opened up birders’ consciousness to a potential, previously unimagined, seabird vagrant.

When asked, at an indoor meeting in Plymouth the following autumn (while busily signing a copy of his revelatory tome “Seabirds”), whether he was surprised by the occurrence of South Polar Skua off the Cornish coast, Peter Harrison’s reaction was an all-knowing raised eyebrow and a slightly withering, though ultimately friendly, response to such schoolboy impertance of “no, no, not at all ~ these birds are out there, we just have to know how to find them”.

And for a few years, people were “finding” them. Further reports included birds off St. Ives on the legendary seawatch of 3rd September 1983 (though some present there on that extraordinary Saturday struggle to remember that claim) with another there the following month. Further St. Ives birds were reported in August 1985 and also on consecutive days between 8th and 10th October 1987.

The same year, in August, one was reported from one of the groundbreaking Harrison-led pelagics in the Western Approaches aboard the M.V. Chalice while a multi-observed classic-looking intermediate South Polar Skua was seen well (and photographed) on a glassy sea on 28th October from the M.V. Scillonian III. Another claim from waters off Scilly came in August 1993, while one was reported off the north Norfolk coast in September 1985.

All of the birds submitted from the batch mentioned above (it should be noted that not all of them were put in front of the Ten Rare Men) were given the heave-ho and South Polar Skua records quietly slipped away. Aside from a brief flurtation with one off Bridges of Ross in August 2006, nothing was heard of this teasing, tricky and sometimes tough to identify species.

Then ~ in June last year ~ South Polar Skuas were suddenly all the rage once more. A dark bird was photographed off Madiera and then a marvellous pale bird was seen from the Spanish mainland in August, heading past Punta de Estaca de Bares, Galicia and Dave McAdams managed a set of shots to make everyone sit up and take notice.

Further birds were seen from the same site in September 2011 and again in August this year (as well as two birds there in 2010). Elsewhere in Spanish waters, three individuals were seen from a pelagic off the Canaries in September last year (captured beautifully by Dani Lopez Velasco) while another record in the Portuguese waters of Madeira came in June this year.

And now, Owen Foley’s Irish fly-by. Its wonderful to see the resurrection of the species in a context that we can identify with (even if the historic records won’t get a look in again) and you wouldn’t want to bet against those most perceptive and skillful observers who tirelessly work the seas off Scilly on-board the MV Sapphire being the next ones to score ~ and there’s every chance that some exciting images would follow with it too....


However, these wouldn’t be the first records of a “southern” skua to be accepted here. Currently two birds are accepted on the British list as being either Brown Skua or South Polar Skua ~ birds on Scilly (picked up on the Gugh bar in October 2001) and the Gower Peninsula in February 2002 (also picked up and taken in to care at Kenfig) were initially thought to have been young “dark” Bonxies but subsequent laboratory work revealed they were Brown Skuas but this significant development was then revised and the birds were re-classified as “southern” skuas.

It could be argued that it’s all a bit of a mish-mash but with pale birds it becomes a that little bit easier (hybrids aside) ~ so let us bid the Cork bird a fair wind as it flies on by towards the Committee stage.

Meanwhile much more of last week's news in the full round-up online including;
Photos of South Polar Skua in the Western Palearctic
White's Thrush in the hand on Barra
Glossy Ibis, Spoonbill and Red-backed Shrike videos
Lesser Spotted Woodpecker on Shetland

Plus much more...