Swedish control
We ringed all four 'age/sex classes' this morning — 2+cy male (above), 2+cy female, 1cy male and 1cy female — and I'll put together some comparison photos with some notes on ageing and sexing when I have a bit of time.
*The reality is that this bird has probably been in Sweden for some time; it was carrying colour rings, which seem to be from a Swedish scheme, so it's been caught nearby at least once previously...
I flushed at least three Jack Snipe whilst walking the rounds this morning (perhaps as many as six, depending if they were coming back to the same spot after they'd been flushed or not), but the only snipe we managed to catch was this 1cy (female — sexed using the length of the outermost tail feather) Common Snipe in one of the walk-in traps.
Again, I have plenty of photos of this bird that I'll put online with a few comments when it's not so late in the day.
Arriving special delivery by courier from that lighthouse (er, that'll be me on a bike then), this 1cy Wryneck:
The bird showed a very obvious moult limit in the tail, visible on the resting bird above as well as in the photo below. It has moulted the outer three feathers; the central two pairs are juvenile.
I was under the impression that Wrynecks had only ten tail feathers; indeed, there are only five pairs of obvious tail feathers visible in the photo above. However, checking BWP, I've discovered that they do in fact show the more expected twelve tail feathers with R6 “strongly reduced, a tiny feather hidden at base of R5” — I wonder if that's what we can see on the bird's left side in the photo above. Something to take a closer look at next time I'm handling a Wryneck!
Perhaps even better than the Wryneck, for me at least: this 1cy Nuthatch.
A ‘domaniewski’ type bird... if you're into naming every arbitrary point on a cline; somewhere between caesia and europaea if you're not!
Ageing the bird is easy and, with a bit of squinting, is even possible in the photo above; the bird has retained a number of juvenile median coverts as well as all of its juvenile greater coverts (which, being a greyer blue than the moulted lesser coverts, inner median coverts and mantle/scapular feathers, form a slight contrast in colour):
A 1cy (female?) Pallid Harrier was hunting over the Flommen reed bed with what was probably a second individual (maybe a male this time) over the observatory when I went back for something to ear.
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