Finally some birding activity after some weeks. Most of my free time I have spend with my children while Sanni has been working. Also some other things to do now and then which has effected to my activity. On 30th of January Liisa and Matti Kapanen found interesting bunting visiting their feeder with a flock of Yellowhammers at Masala, Kirkkonummi. Their first thought was some kind of female Pine Bunting, or hybrid between Yellowhammer x Pine Bunting. Like many have noticed, this is not the easiest mess to figure out..
In last few years our rarities committee rejected many female-type birds from the Finnish list and after getting more and more information of the complex, there is really no straight way to ID these without DNA-sample. This bird looks good. It was even caught and ringed by RC-members and there is no yellow in the bird at all. Many feature looks good for Pine Bunting, but even that is not enough. At this point I was thinking that what is the point to know and learn all the birds if you still have to be molecular biologist to ID this one.. Anyway, I made some kind of "safe twitch" today and bird was showing nicely, but from the distance. I met my friend Peetri Joki, who lives next house of the bunting and together we went to see the bird. Flock was moving nervously around the small area and it took me almost half an hour to see the bird good enough. I even got some poor record shots of the bird. Thank god there is much better ones for example in www.tarsiger.com
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| Poor shot. |
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| Overall color looks very grey in these photos. |
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| Pine Bunting? |
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| A bit better photo. |
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| Bird as feeding in a place like this with Yellowhammers. |
I spend almost an hour there and then I left back to Viikki to check if our long staying Twite would show up again today. It did after some searching it for 20 minutes with few other birders. Finally I found it from feeder and later it moved closer and everybody saw it nicely. Here is few record shots of the bird.
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| Twite. |
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| And again. |
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| Bird was surprisingly easy to find from the flock of Greenfinches and sparrows. |
Nice birds today and possibly my second Pine Bunting ever and 16th for Finland if accepted. I twitched one. also from Kirkkonummi four years ago or something. That was a male bird so much easier. Twite is very rare here in Viikki and also only few birds annually in Helsinki area, so it was nice to catch up with this one too.
More birds next week? Maybe. Full winter going now here, so we have to wait the migrants for some weeks.
-Tom
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