Saturday 10 August 2019

North Uist Revisited ... Common Quail and Sabine's Gull ...

The Western Isles hold good memories for me with great birds such as Gyr Falcon and Harlequin Duck standing out ... so I was very happy to be heading across The Minch from Uig towards Lochmaddy last week ...

A walk around the harbour area at Uig and the first typically Scottish birds were Hooded Crows ... pristine looking birds with pale grey bodies - quite unlike the Hooded x Carrion Crow hybrids that we see sometimes in Cumbria ...


... and smart Rock Pipits called loudly and posed on the quay ...


... a Sedge Warbler sang stridently despite a bill full of food ...



The crossing was pleasant in the warm evening sunshine but not conducive to pelagic birding ...

The resident Starlings on North Uist always seem to have a prominent presence ...


... and great looking birds ... taxonomically they are part of a cline and fall somewhere between the Sturnus vulgaris vulgaris of mainland Britain and Sturnus vulgaris zetlandicus of the Shetland Isles ...

It was good to see a number of Corn Buntings at Balranald ... although I encountered this species nowhere else ...


... offshore at Aird an Runair there was a flock of around 200 Manx Shearwaters ... sometimes on the sea ... and then flying around before settling again ...

Great Black-backed Gulls were fairly ubiquitous ... with some nice looking juveniles ...


With the temperature in the mid-20s I sat on a rocky outcrop near Loch Mor on Benbecula to try to relocate a White-tailed Eagle that had been soaring distantly earlier ... it was not long before it sailed right overhead ...


... and performed some lazy aerobatics ...


So often birds seem to come in clusters ... and next a Short-eared Owl flew across the marsh ground ... and gave some similarly spectacular views ...


... but back on the coast and searching for some migrant waders ... a juvenile Common Gull flew by ...


The sound of Red-throated Divers was almost a constant feature among the many lochans ... calling as they flew ...





Rather more convincing as a distinct form was Hebridean Wren Troglodytes troglodytes hebridensis  ( Meinertzhagen 1924 - and a reminder that this flawed character made some significant contributions to ornithological knowledge despite his larcenous crimes ).  The darker upperparts and particularly the prominent barring on the flanks really stand out ...






The mainly rather small flocks of Greylag Geese certainly looked very much the part as truly wild birds in this landscape ...


Skylarks were very widespread and good to see apparently flourishing in these machair zones ...


... and this was where Twite also were frequent ...



... along with the Twite but generally preferring the slightly higher and more inland areas were a few Linnets ...


... this apparently increasing bird on the Western Isles is of the Scottish form Linaria cannabina autochthona ( Clancey 1946 ) ... not the most convincing of sub-species ...

And eventually on the coast north of Sollas some waders were present on the beaches and mudflats in good numbers ...
... moulting adult Sanderling  were fairly common ...


... with Dunlin as the predominant species ...


... the flocks of migrating 'Tundra type' Ringed Plovers far outnumbered the local breeders ... and looked very attractive with their dark mantles and more delicate face-markings ...


On the peninsula in that same area there came a very unexpected sound ... coming from a barley crop amid the machair a Common Quail sang repeatedly ... apart from a record of one on Orkney and another on Shetland this seems to be the most northerly bird recorded this year ( BirdGuides ) ...





The sonogram shows the surprisingly low frequency of the start of each element of the song ... at around 1.5 kHz ...

Groups of Eiders comprised eclipse males and females ...


Whimbrel were there in small numbers ... very flighty and cryptic amongst the rocks 



... and some Red-throated Divers still in breeding plumage fed in a shallow bay ...




The sea state on the return voyage seemed little better than the outward journey ... then a gull flashed by down wind giving at first an unhelpful tail-on view ... then it banked and showed the characteristic black, white and grey triangles of an adult Sabine's Gull ... and was gone ...










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