Dutch double

I had a day's twitching around Holland at the weekend, our first destination being a Dusky Warbler in Katwijk aan Zee.  It had moved on, however, after four days in the same spot, so we then moved slightly down the coast to try for a Pallas' Leaf Warbler which had been seen that morning.  Once there, it looked as if we were heading for another failure as the tree it had been regularly visiting was very empty and even the nearby tit and Short-toed Treecreeper calls soon died away.  After half an hour of waiting, though, there it was all of a sudden, together with a Goldcrest, completely silent and constantly feeding.  I didn't even bother to try and get a picture but there were plenty of others who did.  Funnily enough, my only other Pallas' Warbler was also in The Netherlands exactly ten years ago.  With the windy conditions, we next decided to try the pier in Scheveningen hoping for some windblown seabirds but it was even quieter than my recent trip to Ostend, with one Great Crested Grebe and a couple of Common Gulls being the highlights!  A first-winter male Desert Wheatear had just been relocated at Schiphol airport, however, which was on our way back to Amsterdam, so we made a brief stop for that right at the end of the day and the bird was visible as soon as we stepped out of the car!  This really was a beauty and my first in Europe as I'd only ever seen them in Israel and Jordan.  So, despite Dusky Warbler yet again eluding me, it was a succesful day with two rarities seen well.  The following day, I twitched this Iceland Gull on its favourite canal in the centre of Amsterdam which is almost certainly the same bird I already wrote about two years ago but looking completely different now it is in its fourth year.

The hungry hordes

I visited my Brussels patch this past week and found a nice group of birds feeding amongst the leaf litter.  See if you can find and identify the four species in the above picture!  Our female Ferruginous Duck is back for her sixth consecutive winter and this winter-plumaged Black-headed Gull was a timely reminder that winter isn't too far off.

As a result, I hung a peanut bag on my balcony on Thursday afternoon, the first time I'd put any food out for my 'garden' birds since March, and expected it would take a few days for them to find it.  Within half an hour, however, I already had these two Ring-necked Parakeets tucking in with a pair of Jays looking on.  Amazing how they can suddenly appear where there had been no food for months on end, almost as if they were just sitting there waiting for me.  The Jays have since emptied the bag completely in less than four days, surely stashing most of the nuts away for harsher times as I can't believe they were that hungry!