It's been a remarkably poor spring for Ospreys on Portland with this bird being only the second recorded © Erin Taylor:
A couple of days ago we made passing reference to an odd Chiffchaff trapped at the Obs. Since being on a slightly more systematic lookout in recent years for potential Iberian Chiffchaffs we've got so used to picking out seemingly bright green-and-yellow chiffchaffs, some of which have had slightly out of the ordinary morphology and other pro-Iberian features, that we no longer make much of a fuss about it and rarely get very excited about them - genetic analysis has should that all our possible candidates to date have turned out to be 'Common' Chiffchaffs (...or at least, their mothers have). To be truthful, we really haven't got a clue how you nail a silent, in-hand Iberian Chiffchaff with absolutely certainty - you can have an inkling but that usually turns out to be wrong! Anyway, Saturday's bird was a dinky little female that was clearly not going to sing and certainly didn't call but it immediately struck us as worth further attention. Time will tell what the outcome is... © Martin Cade: