Christine's walking & birds blog

The Ullapool River spit was a breezy, rainy place to walk out on mid-morning and the tide was still quite high, but it got me closer to the action than yesterday. A mixed flock of turnstones and ringed plovers flew in as the water receded, and a curlew called unseen. A white-winger on the end of the golf-course spit almost certainly wasn't an Iceland, but whether it was a glaucous or a hybrid (herring/glaucous), I'm not sure. It looks like a glaucous to me, but now I know about hybrids I'll have to read up on them.


At the moment, I'm concentrating on a family of warblers I saw on Gran Canaria - which I'd forgotten about until I was going through and deleting holiday pics yesterday. These, I think, are two of the young.


I thought of whitethroats at the time, but they didn't seem quite right - they appeared to be more slightly built, and wasn't the tail too dark? Researching now, I learn that while female and juvenile whitethroats have brown heads, spectacled warblers have grey. These, and an adult bird that flew in and fed them, had grey heads. I'm not sure whitethroats even breed on the Canary Islands - whereas spectacled warblers are quite common and should be breeding about now. I'd better go back to make sure :o)

The white balls in the newt puddle up the quarry road are possibly snail eggs - but again, it's a work in progress. More research needed in all areas!