Champions of the Flyway!

Monday, February 4, 2019

Bird of the Week #4 - Pallas's Leaf Warbler

Spot the sexy Siberian seven-striped sprite! A classic dream east coast scene in late autumn
 
Part four of an ongoing effort to both blog more and cull the photo mountain this year, here's the first passerine to feature - Pallas's Leaf Warbler, a jewel-like waif from the mountain forests of Siberia eastwards.... as implied by their trip-off-the-tongue latin name of Phylloscopus proregulus, these tiny eastern dynamos are similar in size and behaviour to our more familiar Goldcrest (Regulus regulus), and often find themselves side-by-side in feeding flocks working through the curled-leaf Sycamore canopy of a British east coast copse.


Despite hailing from so far afield, they're an annual vagrant to our shores in small numbers, and are thus very much an on-the-radar aspiration for east coast birders, especially after easterly winds in late autumn. It took me a few years to find my own here in Filey (who'd have put money on finding Brünnich's Guillemot and Iberian Wagtail first?!), but I've thankfully stumbled upon a handful of my own since, and each was as exciting as the last.

A little easier.....
 
They're that kind of bird: hugely charismatic, indicative of superheroic long distance migration, glittering beautiful and rare - basically perfect.

.... and easier still (all photos taken here in the Filey area)