The bird that keeps on giving

An early Christmas present arrived for me today in the form of the British Ornitholigists' Union decision to 'split' Northern Harrier from Hen Harrier, thus bestowing it with full species status in the eyes of the keepers of the official British list. This makes it the 599th addition to said list, and the 452nd to my own via that most decadent of means, the 'armchair tick'. More importantly, the one I discovered on Portland in April last year (identified from my photos by Martin Cade) gets an upgrade to become the most recent addition to the Dorset list, which now stands at 423. The fact that I was the only person to see it still creates mixed feelings, sort of summed up by the reaction to today's news from birding friends: the public Tweets have been generous ('well done'), the private texts less so ('jammy get')!

It's been, ooh, at least 6 months since this photo of the Portland Northern Harrier made an appearance on these pages - but I make no apologies for a repeat appearance on the day it was elevated to full species status on the British and Dorset lists. And besides, I haven't taken many other photos lately.

So what do I take from all this as the Christmas holiday approaches? Should I slob out in the armchair more often? Statistically, taking December as a random sample, it certainly seems to offer better prospects of adding to my list than actually going birding, for which there hasn't been much opportunity lately anyway. Tempting, isn't it, but I think not: that April I stumbled across the Northern Harrier, I was thrashing around my favourite Dorset haunts pretty assiduously, determined to find something good, and for once it worked. That's settled then, outdoors it is, and I resolve to make more effort to go there.

For those in the 'jammy get' camp, I will try not to dwell on the Northern Harrier again, though I reserve the right to make a brief reference to it in the forthcoming 'review of the year' post. Until then, a very merry Christmas to you all, and many thanks for reading.

Armchair ticking

The British Birds Rarities Committee, which assesses the voracity of reports of rare birds in this country, can take quite a while to pronounce with some complex and controversial cases taking years, even decades, to conclude. So it was a relief to see it take less than a year to rule on a couple of special birds which I saw in April last year. First of these was a Baikal Teal in Cambridgeshire. There could be no doubt about the identification of this bird, only the origin, but the Committee was clearly satisfied with its provenance, so my slightly superstitious decision not to add it to my Bubo list until it was deemed acceptable seems sort of vindicated. And now gives me the pleasure of adding that most effortless of things to my list, the armchair tick.

Baikal Teal, Fen Drayton, Cambridgeshire, 2nd April 2014

On the same day as it ruled on the Baikal Teal, the BBRC also accepted my own record of Northern Harrier on Portland, I think just the 7th accepted record of the hudsonicus sub-species of Hen Harrier in Britain. My footnote in Dorset birding history thus seems secure, and Ref No 5637 will forever have a place in my list of portentous numbers which I really should remember, but probably won't. My account of how it was found and identified remains far and away the most popular post to have appeared on this blog, with 1,800+ page views to date.

Male Northern Harrier, Portland, Dorset, 21st April 2014

Speaking of armchair ticks, after a recount, I have also gained another half dozen on the 2015 photo year list, by virtue of not counting birds photographed in an earlier post. Maths never was my strong point. On the up side, this brings the total up to 120. On the down-side, it means that the Waxwing loses its crown as the 100th species to appear on the blog this year, and has to hand it to a scabby Greylag Goose (or, if I recount in the strict chronological order the photos were taken, Bittern, which is a bit more respectable).

With no holidays planned for a few months though, a busy year ahead, and bearing in mind that when I have bothered to tot up a year list in the last few years I haven't breached the 250 barrier, realisation is already dawning that I am not going to be pulling up many trees, tally wise. Still, it's early days so I'll persevere, despite dipping on a local Great White Egret, re-re-re-re-refound and photographed very nicely by Steve Smith today. I scrambled, but it didn't hang around, hence returning to the comfort of the armchair.

Northern Harrier: the flounderer's account

'Reidentified from photos' is one of those phrases which makes good birders roll their eyes in pity at the clueless halfwit who has the good fortune to stumble across a quality bird and not know what it is. Serendipity and digital cameras have combined to make this an increasingly frequent phenomenon, and today, blessed with the benefit of both, I became that halfwit.

Rufous spotting on the underside visible in this shot

My Swineham patch had been a complete, well, swine last week, turning up a frisky pair of Stilts the minute my back was turned, so still piqued with it this morning, I headed off early to Portland instead. In your face, Swineham. A fistful of Wheatears, a Whinchat and a flyover Yellow Wag enlivened Barleycrates Lane, and having walked Reap Lane and compared notes with Pete Coe, I doubled back on myself to catch out those sneaky rarities which I surmised had been pulling faces and flicking v-signs behind my back on the way down. I was a good way down the Lane from the seaward end when I looked back and saw a large pale bird flying purposefully north in the distance, which I suspected was a Harrier. Views through bins appeared to confirm a male Hen Harrier but it was too far away to be completely sure to species level so I hoisted the lens for some record shots. The bottom photo is the original size which gives some idea of the distance involved, and while the back of the camera shots were still very small they cropped up surprisingly well.

Less black in the outer primaries than Hen Harrier

We see Hen Harriers through the winter in Poole Harbour so I didn't think it that remarkable, though on arrival at the Obs and telling others about it, it seemed that Hen Harrier may be rarer than I realised on Portland. The Warden Martin Cade said he would appreciate even a poor Hen Harrier shot for the website so I happily obliged when I got home. Shortly after the phone rang and it was Martin asking if I had considered Northern Harrier, the American subspecies of Hen Harrier. In all honesty, I hadn't. I had noticed some apparent rufous markings on the underside in some shots, but having ruled our Monty's, I put this down to it being a not quite adult male. Martin had additionally noted the darkness of the hood, and the more limited extent of black in the primaries. The former I had dismissed as a trick of the light, the latter I just hadn't studied hard enough having concluded it was obviously not the black wedge of a Pallid.

The Harrier just kept going north and never looked back

I was then tied up with family duties for the afternoon and had to leave it to the experts to ponder further - Martin contacted Martin Garner who shared the view that it was a Northern Harrier, the news went out and my pager buzzed with a message to that effect as I tucked into ham, egg and chips at the Bankes's Arms. Brett Spencer had come to the same conclusion on seeing the photos independently so that's three opinions I'm not going to argue with. Now I'm feeling sort of pleased at playing a part in turning up a potential first for Dorset, but sort of a tube for not realising it at the time, and bad that no-one else seems to have seen it subsequently. In my defence I have no experience of Northern Harrier here or anywhere else, and a memory like a sieve, so even if I had it might not have helped. After I put the phone down to Martin, I googled a Birding Frontiers blog post about a Northern Harrier in Cornwall and had a moment of recognition like Dory in the film Finding Nemo, which any parents out there are sure to be familiar with. If not, see here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDpqi_6UHGk. Suddenly it all came flooding back.

The best I could manage of the uppertail which is dark-tipped in Northern Harrier - click to enlarge

So, a very big thanks to Martins Cade (for the initial identification) and Garner (for the confirmation) for shedding all this light. Without Martin's request for a record shot there might have been nothing to be reidentified as even by the low photographic standards of this blog I might never have posted those grainy shots. No complaints, then, just a request: can I have an easier one next time please?

The original, back of the camera shot. Where would we be without digital photography? (Ed: still ignorant in my case, but with even less capacity for learning).