Monday 2 June 2014

Cemlyn Blyth's Reed Warbler

My fellow warden David Wright had the good fortune to find a mystery warbler singing from low in a Hawthorn beside the pool at Ty'n Llan on Saturday night. Views were brief and poor, enough to see that the bird was an Acrocephalus spp. With such a strange song Dave's rarity radar went into overdrive and he summoned me to the site. We both realied that this was a good bird, were confused by the vocalisations and went back to base to check the mighty xeno-canto database for candidate species. Listening to some of the fantastic recordings here or suspicions were confirmed and we realised that we had an A.dumetorum! Back at the bird I attempted to obatin recordings with my Sennheiser mic and minidisc. Unfortunately, the bloody minidisc died :-( The only option was to obtain a recording with my Blackberry phone. So here it is, a poor quality raw unedited sondscape with the noise of me creeping along (plenty of 'snap, crackle and pop') an Oystercatcher overhead and the Blyth's Reed singing away. This is a very significant Welsh record with only a handful of previous records. Does anyone know exactly how many there have been? I spent two frustrating days watching one on my local patch in Aberdaron some years ago but without photographs I couldn't properly document that occurence so it's great to finally nail one! Great shame that no other birders connected, I had a few texts back with messages like 'Too late and/or pissed'! Here's the link - not quite 'Sound Approach' quality! Still I'm glad tht some tech works, without this recording the record would most proabaly be lost... http://www.xeno-canto.org/180476

1 comment:

  1. Ours was the second for Wales last autumn. A singing bird on Skomer this spring makes yours a fourth for Wales! Nice one.

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