Tuesday 18 November 2014

St David's Head and a few more pics of the possible Blyth's Pipit

Annie and I planned to watch seabirds from St David's Head for a few hours today, but on approaching the Kissing Gate we saw Mike Y-P clearly watching something interesting on the coast ahead of us. He beckoned us over and so we knew it most probably would be a good bird!

After a while I managed with Mike to see the "pipit". Although clearly larger and chunkier than nearby meadow pipits to me it didn't seem to have a bulky or long-tailed appearance and had more or less the build of a meadow pipit but was clearly larger. It's flight calls were rather short "chrup, chrup" sort of sounds, not particularly loud and nothing like any Richard's I've ever heard over the last 40+ years.

Here are some additional images. They are not brilliant but were the best I could manage with a small compact camera. The upper one shows two meadow pipits at the bottom and the "other pipit" at the top right.





Other species of note, seen by Annie at the Head, included a fine adult male velvet scoter heading towards Strumble and 2 little auks heading west. Offshore up to 1,000 kittiwakes were feeding some way off to the north-west. All in all a brilliant day.

Thanks Mike for flagging us down!