Pallid Harrier in Innsbruck!

Oh yes, you read it right, a PALLID HARRIER IN INNSBRUCK!
This is a bird that has always occupied my imagination since I was a kid, but the closest I have ever come to seeing one was to pick up a Montagues Harrier near oNgoye in northeastern South Africa (also quite a find, but no Pallid Harrier).

not a great photo, but check out the pure white wings and body, and the black wedge wing tips (with a white leading edge, unlike the Hen Harrier and Montagu's Harrier)

Anyhow, the Pallid Harriers are supposed to migrate from eastern Africa and various parts of Asia, up to their breeding areas in Ukraine and further east in Asia. So why a Pallid Harrier decided to visit the still snowy Alps is something of a mystery to me.

After a morning birding at my local patch (the Inzinger Gaisau), Andreas and I headed across to Ehnbachklamm to quickly look for Wallcreeper (without luck), and then stopped in front of Martinswand (the huge cliff overlooking Innsbruck) to look for the Peregrine pair that I had seen hunting there fairly often lately.

As we soaked in the very welcome sun, we scanned the cliff for anything interesting (Eagle Owls, Wallcreeper...).
Two pairs of Eurasian Kestrel circled laxidasically.
Ooh, "what's that", cries Andreas
I only need a second's look to know that I really wanted to have my camera ready. So, I left the ID stuff to Andreas and frantically tried to find it with my digiscoping setup. But it was just one of those days when nothing photo-wise works...
So I abanoded that as a bad idea so to get a better look through the bins. Andreas got a good look through the scope. It was when it caught something that we got great view of it eating.

A little bit of video of the Pallid Harrier feeding way up high on the Martinswand. The video was taken at 150x magnification as it was sooo far (putting a lot of strain on the silly little lens that comes with the Canon A590IS I use for digiscoping).

It was perched on the cliff, eating, for a good half hour before it headed off to the West. Wolfgang and Silvia joined us the quarry (Steinbruch) in Zirl where we got great views of Alpine Swifts and Crag Martins, but no Pallid Harrier anywhere.
Idle chit chat...

And suddenly it popped up from the field right next to us, circled a few times right over us and then slowly headed back towards the main Martinswand cliff...

Happy birding,
Dale

p.s. if I get a few moments over the next couple of days, I will write a blog about the Alpine Swifts and the Rock Buntings I found this morning

More photos from Lago di Garda, Italy

I wanted to add a few more bird (birding and other) photos from our trip to Lago di Garda, northern Italy.
This is a shot taken one dawn from one of the beaches near Manerba dei Garda, looking towards the cliffs of La Rocca (where I did most of my birding).

Looking out over the ocean. There were a good few pairs of Yellowlegged Gulls flying about, as well as common swifts and alpine swifts, crag martins and barn swallows. Sardinian warblers were calling in the background.










Two more shots of the incredibly cute redcrested pochards that were hanging about the port at San Francisco de Garda (all taken through my binoculars).


And a reed warbler singing away in the reed bed near the point at San Biaggio. There were about 30 singing there in this tiny little reed bed. A couple of little sedge warblers were also hanging out between them, but were completely silent and tended to be lower in the reeds, feeding right near water level. But, they were also more likely to use the non-reed material for perching, i.e. the sticks and fallen branches that lay about.

Alpine Swifts

I remember the day I first saw an Alpine Swift (Alpensegler, Apus melba). It must have been around Christmas time late 1990 or so. Hot. We were just driving in to downtown Durban as a wave of swifts shot over the car. Swifts everywhere! What a sight. As usual, most of them were whiterumped and little swifts (Kaffernsegler und Haussegler) but then these HUGE swifts came by. They looked like mammoths zooting across the sky. And with that bright white belly! I knew exactly what they were almost before I had even seen them.

Over the years I got more familiar with them. Dawn cape parrot counts overlooking Hlabeni forest were often greeted by the swooshing of razor-edged wings as they sped past our faces. Breathtaking. To say the least.

I was reminded of these lovely birds the other day when I found the most incredible photo-blog by Graham Catley. He had posted three images of Alpine Swifts feeding on the wing - some of the best swift photos I have ever seen.

And then yesterday afternoon I was peering outside (as I am wont to do) and there was a whole group of them feeding over the houses in eastern Zirl. There movements are so graceful, so, well swift. It seems they are just returning from their migration to Africa and we will hopefully see a whole lot more of them over the coming months, particularly in the mountain regions.

The photo that shows all the swifts circling the town (its just a wiki commons photo so I don't know where it is from) is often how you will see them - dashing quickly about. They are hard to track with your binoculars but their large size and white breast is likely to make their identification somewhat easier. Interestingly, while swifts (Segler) may look like swallows (Schwalben), they are only very distantly related. The easiest way to tell the difference between the two in the air is to look at the wing shape - swifts have long, thin wings that make them look like darting boomerangs. The swallows have a rounder wing shape, not as sharp as the swifts.

The swifts belong to the order Apodiformes (meaning no feet. hummingbirds are also in this same order), an apt name for a bird with such tiny legs and feet. Talking about feet, the difference between swift and swallows is immediately obvious when one has them in the hand. Swifts have pamprodactyl feet which means that both the first and fourth toe can swivel forward so that all four toes are in a row. This helps the swifts cling to the cliffs when they (very occasionally) land. You can see this clearly in Prof David Norman's photo, left. The swallows have decidedly longer legs with normal bird feet, i.e. three toes forward one back. The swallows are much more likely to perch - they are the ones that you see sitting on telephone lines alongside roads and fields.

Alpine Swifts prefer to breed in cliff or cave nest sites, and generally lay two to three eggs. The adults feed exclusively on small insects caught on the wing, which means that during cold and wet periods, flying insect food can be severely limited. Incredibly, it seems that the chicks are able to survive these enforced fasts by reducing their body temperature (torpor) and by mobilizing the energy in their relatively large pectoral muscles (Bize, Klopfenstein, Jeanneret & Roulin 2007 Journal of Ornithology 148/4).

If you are interested in their breeding, check out the webcams of two Alpine Swift nests in southwestern Germany.

Happy birding, Dale Forbes