Mothing was again rather disappointing, with a lone Olive-tree Pearl at the Obs just about the best of a limited selection of immigrants from overnight trapping.
Western Bonelli's Warbler, Wryneck, Yellow Wagtail and Little Stint - Portland Bill, Southwell and Ferrybridge, 22nd August 2015 © Martin Cade (Bonelli's and watchers) and Pete Saunders (all others)
The specific ID of the Bonelli's Warbler as a Western as opposed to an Eastern was very quickly established since immediately after its discovery it called quite frequently; however, it very soon became much quieter and, being rather anal about securing 'tangible' documentation of such things, after several hours of trailing around after it we were getting more than a little frustrated with not having recorded any of the very occasional calls that it uttered. It seemed by then that the best bet might just be to pick a spot and leave the recorder running unattended so we could get on with some other jobs. Nick Hopper had recently shown us how much easier it was to visually go through a sonogram of long recordings rather than actually listen right through them, and this evening we had a rather wonderful eureka moment when working through our resulting two hour long sonogram to suddenly see, an hour and 20 minutes in, a series of 'inverted Vs' that we recognised from the voice section in BWP:
And here's the little burst of four Bonelli's calls, onto to which we've tagged a variety of other phyllosc calls that cropped up elsewhere in the recording:
And here's the little burst of four Bonelli's calls, onto to which we've tagged a variety of other phyllosc calls that cropped up elsewhere in the recording:
...and as a reminder of just how radically different Eastern Bonelli's sounds, here's the recording of the Eastern at Avalanche Road in May 2009:
Finally, Peter Moore petermooreblog has very kindly just sent us through a few of his photos of today's bird that add nicely to giving a feel of how it looked on the usually brief moments when it popped into view: