Anyone who likes a Hoopoe - is there anyone who doesn't? - is having a field day this spring. Very excitingly, today's bird at the Bill was actually watched flying in from far out to sea and later settled quite well for a while in one of the lanes leading down to East Cliffs...
...there's a lot of enjoyment in quietly watching a Hoopoe that doesn't come with an attendant phalanx of photographers sticking £10,000 lenses up it's backside in an attempt to get it to raise its crest for them © Martin Cade:
There also can't be many folk who don't like a Pied Flycatcher, so today's male trapped at the Obs was a popular bird...
...ageing-wise, amongst other things the chocolate brown flight feathers and old, juvenile outermost greater covert made things quite straightforward - this one's a second-year male. Of entirely esoteric interest, check out the moult visible in the secondaries where the innermost three feathers are clearly new - blacker and with a differently-shaped boundary between the the black and white than on the old outer three feathers; this actually isn't any use for definitive ageing since quite a few Pied Flycatchers apparently moult some secondaries during their pre-breeding moult; however, second-year birds - like this one - evidently usually moult a little more extensively in this feather tract than adults do which perhaps explains why our bird has half of its secondaries new © Martin Cade:
