Saturday 12 September 2015

Alaw Reservoir yesterday

Many thanks to Ste C for updating on the Alaw Reservoir situation, and of course to Geoff and the team for all their hard work. I had to take my car to Pentraeth yesterday, so thought i'd combine with a visit to the south hide as it'd been on my "to do" list for a couple of years. Found the hide after a while, it obviously hadn't been used a lot as there were owl pellets scattered around! No mud visible, so after checking the ducks, the last resort was the distant flock of gulls along the far side on the water. An ad YLG was nice, then i got a "wow" factor as i scanned through and the bird in the linked video appeared in my scope. Apologies for the poor quality, but the birds were distant and i was on 60x on my scope and full zoom on my phone. The bird had a strikingly pale head and breast, with a noticeably pear-shaped head with a long, parallel-sided bill and small piggy eyes. It appeared somewhat attenuated due to an impression of long (folded) wings, which seem slightly "bulky" from the base of the tertials and can be seen in the clip. I think the primaries might still be growing. I tried posting earlier but couldn't get the video to load, then Hennerz suggested uploading to Youtube. I thought it looked good for 2nd calendar-year Caspian Gull, though whether there's enough on it for a submission i seriously doubt! Having just looked at the uploaded video on Youtube, the quality is significantly worse than it is on my laptop, pausing it helps somewhat but it's sill pretty crap tbh! Something to look out for anyway in any gull flocks, especially in fields etc i would guess.

Cheers, Mike.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIXE66PCsoc&feature=youtu.be

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