It was heartening to be woken by a Rain Alarm alert today and to look out and find that heavy cloud cover had rolled in overnight. Whilst the damp didn't really materialise the cloud was more than enough to drop to visible height the first substantial Meadow Pipit movement of the spring: a steady flow was evident throughout the Bill area, with a 90 minute sample count of 590 heading along West Cliffs suggesting that the day's full total would have been way into four figures; a few alba wagtails and Goldfinches were tagging along but to all intents and purposes the passage was a bit of a monoculture. The cloud had almost no effect on the ongoing parlous state of affairs on the ground, with 1 Chiffchaff the sum total of arrivals at the Bill where, rather unexpectedly, one of last week's Bullfinches also came out of the woodwork after going missing for several days. The increased cloud cover arrived in tandem with a freshening of the northeasterly that in turn saw the sea come up with 3 Velvet Scoters and a Greylag Goose, along with another dozen passing Red-throated Divers.
Through the scope the presumably migrant Greylag Goose powering up-Channel into the teeth of a stiff and cold northeasterly looked pretty impressive but you need a substantial dollop of imagination to pick up on that from our two mile range record snap of it battling through the Race © Martin Cade:
Our last two Bullfinches of last week's mini arrival were a brace of nice males - one an adult and the other one of last year's youngsters (the latter was the bird that popped up out of the blue again today). We often find spring Bullfinches pretty tricky to age on a field view - unlike, for example, Goldfinches or Greenfinches in which the adults are usually much more vividly coloured than youngsters and lack any trace of discontinuity in the greater coverts, both age classes of Bullfinch usually look pretty much the same in terms of the intensity of their plumage colouration. Fortunately, in the hand they're almost always a doddle to age because pretty well all youngsters retain the juvenile carpal covert (the rather forlorn-looking little feather tagged on the outside end of the greater coverts - arrowed in our photos below - that's hardly ever visible on a field view of a Bullfinch) - on an adult this feather has a nice crisply marked greyish-white edge/tip, whereas on a youngster it has a diffuse rusty-toned rim. Our youngster does have three retained juvenile outer greater coverts that are less glossy and with smaller, more diffuse pale tips than the corresponding feathers on the adult, but to our eyes there's enough of a blue gloss on these feathers that once they're bunched up on the closed wing as they would be on a field view the difference isn't at all obvious © Martin Cade:
