It has been another very quiet week of trying to spot migrants from by balcony, with just a few more Swallows, a group of five Jackdaw, and 3 Herring Gulls of note. There was also what may have been an immature Great Black-backed Gull, an extremely rare bird this far inland, but it was just too far away to be certain, my tentative identification being predominantly based on how big it looked since I thought it was a stork at first. Things are going over, however, and two other migration counters elsewhere in Brussels managed to connect with a pair of Caspian Terns migrating over the city!
Following on from the unexpectedly successful review of my Australian notebook, I also went through my notes from Mexico 2010, where I participated in the annual Swainson's Hawk migration count.
I was much better at keeping notes then so wasn't really expecting to make any more discoveries but, lo-and-behold, the 'Western' Scrub-Jays I saw in Mexico City have since been split as Woodhouse's Scrub-Jay, thus making it my fifth lifer in confinement. Of course, I didn't take any pictures of this 'species' I'd seen many a time in California, so I thought I'd show some transatlantic cousins instead. At the top of this post is, obviously, a Great Spotted Woodpecker taken from my balcony recently, while the woodpecker I would regularly see from my balcony in Chavarrillo was this Golden-fronted. This, again, is rather different to the ones in Texas and may well be split off at some point in the future.
