The great thing about Birding is that you can take it to any level you want; whether you travel the planet looking for birds, watching birds in your own back garden or at your local nature reserve, identifying birds just by call, or you might be able to pick out a second year Caspian Gull at the merest glance on your local reservoir… this is what makes Birding so interesting!! One of the great appeals for me in Birding is Local Patch recording; you have a given area near where you live or an area which you visit on a regular basis and you record what birds you find there as the months pass. Slowly over time you build a picture of what birds pass through on a seasonal basis and if you are lucky a rarity or a scarce visitor will inevitably brighten up the day!! This is exactly what happened to me the other day…….
After a Doctors appointment last Wednesday 3oth November; I was returning home and stopped by the bridge near the local supermarket. As I was checking the bushes on the other side of the stream, I could hear a Chaffinch calling and sure enough a male Chaffinch came into view. As the Chaffinch was feeding, another much smaller bird came into view with very pale underparts. Immediately, I knew it was a warbler but with no binoculars to hand I could not confirm its identification. I then watched it for another 5 minutes or so, I could see no obvious wing bars or crown stripes so I knew it wasn’t a Pallas’ or Yellow browed. By this time, I was pretty sure it was a Chiff-chaff .. but the paleness of the bird really struck me. After watching the bird disappear amongst the branches of a sycamore, I decided to walk home and return with bins and camera…. and I am glad I did.
On my return, I could not find the bird ….. panic set in!!! But I needn’t have worried as the bird had moved further along the bank. By this time my birding mate Alf had turned up – I had alerted him earlier… it’s always good to have two sets of eyes …. we both got good views of the bird and perhaps more importantly some photos too!!! What struck us both was how pale the bird was especially its underparts looking almost white in the sunlight. But infact they were a very light grey. The crown was a grey brown bleeding into a grey mantle. There were no discernible wing bars and coverts were edged with suffesed green. The head showed a faint supercillium that was most obvious behind the eye, the eye was a shiny black, accentuated by a broken white eye-ring ,the throat was a light white grey colour.
Having looked at the photographs, I initially dismissed ‘tristis’ as I thought it was too light in body colour for this variant of Chiff-chaff . I then considered ‘abientus’ which is a Scandinavian form of Chiff-chaff… but on further discussion with another birder friend Graham, he confirmed ‘tristis’; on further reading I found out that there can be a wide range of plumage variations in ‘tristis’ forms of Chiff- chaffs. As the saying goes…… ‘everyday is a school day’ …… especially where Birding is concerned!!!!
