Winter warmer for blog birthday

Well that is a year of Morgithology blog posting - 150 posts in 365 days ain't bad. The blog has not quite ended up doing what I orginally intended. Even the casual reader may have noted that there isn't much about the ecology of Lothian. Instead random musings on the identification of poorly photographed gulls. Well, if you are one of the few reading this then you must like it - or maybe you followed a bad link... Either way, since the weather has turned decidedly chilly over the last few days here are some pics of Provencal birds, photographed in the sweltering heat of Mediterranean July: Great Spotted Cuckoo, Bee-eater, Alpine Swift and Roller. Don't worry, I am keeping true to form - none is in focus...

Musselburgh Pom and Med Gull

Bookended the day with a seawatch off Musselburgh morning and evening. Good numbers of gulls around, particularly Kittiwakes moving west in the evening. Stephen W watching further along the coast at Ferny Ness scored with a Sabine's Gull just after I headed for home - don't quite know whether or when it would have passed Musselburgh but it was one of the species that I was looking out for today.

My main targets were skuas and although I was pretty certain that I saw three species today, only a couple of Pomarine Skuas in the morning and a single Arctic in the evening were clinched. It might well have been a good day to be watching from Hound Point. It is a few years ago now, but I've had all four species from there in the space of a few hours.

Best bird of the day however goes to a winter adult Mediterranean Gull seen feeding among a group of Black-headed and Common Gulls. While Mediterranean Gulls are no longer unusual at Musselburgh, this is the first I have seen here this year and also the first that I have picked up in the scope while seawatching - normally I have seen them loafing or at most coasting. Hopefully it will be a more frequent sight as numbers continue to build year on year it seems. Not the plumage of today's bird, here is a pic taken in the South of France this summer.

Unlike this bird photographed on a hot summer evening in the Med, today's birding was decidedly Arctic, both in temperature and supporting cast - Long-tailed Duck, Goldeneye, Slavonian Grebe as well as the Velvet Scoters, Goosander and Red-breasted Mergansers... Brrr...

Slender-billed Gulls

Time to break my blogger's block and get back to posting. The last couple of months have been either very busy workwise with no time for birding or blogging, or, more recently, away from home enjoying a family holiday in SE France. By no means a birding holiday, there was nevertheless a nice selection of birds, butterflies, mammals and flowers to provide plenty of distractions in many of the locations we visited.

These Slender-billed Gulls were on a shallow Etang near Palavas and were the only ones we stumbled upon on the trip. One of my all-time favourite species, I always get a real kick out of seeing them, maybe related to the fact that when I first saw them as a student on a birding trip to Spain I was suffering from a severe case of food poisoning thanks to some ill-chosen tapas the night before but all that was forgotten while a flock of these birds was in view.

Adult Slender-billed Gulls are particularly attractive with a pink wash to the underparts and dark eye and bill, and in flight they are particularly graceful. 

Unfortunately when they touch down on land they are transformed slightly. Their elongated neck, which adds to their grace in flight, suddenly looks out of proportion, and if the three birds below are anything to go by, it looks a trifle uncomfortable as well!

Just for comparison, here is a nice pink summer adult standing behind a second calendar year bird. Note the bleached plumage of the latter.