Monday 5 March 2012

Redpolls

Following on from Steve's post, this stunner of a Redpoll was on Bardsey in autumn last year. Any comments?
It was big and pale, clearly a common Redpoll, and quite possibly from the north-west



This bird below was trapped on 10 May 2009 and again was thought to be from Iceland

3 comments:

  1. Hi Steve, First impression was that your bird looked like Steve's...so to speak. Very clean front and bigish bib and bill. I was wondering if many get ringed in Iceland and after a trawl I found this page of a range of birds photo'd in a garden in the South of Iceland. Big variation but some similar to yours:
    http://www.fsu.is/~ornosk/audnutittlingar/audnutittlingar.html

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  2. Hi Steve. The bottom bird does look like the bird I saw in Iceland. Regarding the pale well-marked bird there is a note in Advanced birding regarding islandica.It said it is very variable and possibly a hybrid population between Rostrata (Greenland Common) and Arctic hornemanni (= cf Italian Sparrow ie stable Hybrid population).It said there are 2 types. One dark similar to Greenland Redpoll and one pale similar to arctic but with distinct patterning on the flanks, like your top bird.

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  3. We should have that get together this spring with all the detail available and only have Redpolls as the agenda!

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