OBP!

Olive-backed Pipit by Alain Boeckx

October has turned out to be the month of the three-letter birds.  After my wonderful YBW discovery at the start of the month, an Olive-backed Pipit decided to spend 11 days in a nature reserve at the coast.  This is a scarce but regular autumn migrant in Belgium with 20 accepted records until the end of 2019.  They do not usually stay for long, however, so I have never been able to see one.  I first tried after work with just one hour of daylight remaining on day four of its stay but couldn't locate it, a first-winter male Ring Ouzel being my only consolation.  Two days later, I returned to find a cluster of birders staring at a bush and, after around ten minutes, got my first, frustrating view of its back as it crept mouse-like through the vegetation.  I soon got a good view of its head, though, which was much creamier than I expected and very different from our regular Tree Pipits, with the bird eventually popping out of the long grass into full view.  Just at that moment, some other birders who were positioned further along the path came rushing along to get a better view and flushed it so I wasn't able to get any pictures.  Another Brussels birder kindly let me use his instead.  Merci, Alain! 
Olive-backed Pipit is only my second lifer this year and it has been a long, long wait since the Dusky Thrush way back in January.

Olive-backed Pipit by Alain Boeckx

Olive-backed Pipit by Alain Boeckx

Migration madness

It's been a mad, mad week of migration here in Brussels (and elsewhere)!  So far this autumn, there has been very little sign of migration from my balcony but things started to happen on Monday, with small numbers of various species passing, including at least 21 Fieldfare, 2 Redwing, 2 Song Thrush, 4 late Swallows, several Skylark, Linnet and the first Merlin for my flat list.  Heading home from work at 11pm, I could still hear Redwings and Song Thrushes passing over the centre of Brussels so it was clear something big was happening.  By Tuesday morning, the floodgates had well and truly opened as I went out onto my balcony to the sight of groups of birds all over the sky.  It was chaos and I didn't know where to look, let alone attempt some kind of count, but I reckon I probably saw around 1000 Redwings and at least 100 Song Thrushes, together with smaller numbers of Blackbird, Fieldfare and Skylark.  A Peregrine joined in the fun, as did a big formation of 38 Cormorants, and I simply lost a migrating Sparrowhawk amongst the clouds of Redwings passing through my field of view!  A quick tour of my local park just ahead of some light drizzle had Redwings literally dropping out of the sky.  I hadn't seen such concentrated migration of one species since the Skylarks of October 2016, and trektellen.nl confirmed my suspicions as migration counts all over the Benelux had smashed their day records for Redwing, with 2480 counted elsewhere in Brussels and a couple of Belgian sites reporting over 20,000 of them.  Flamborough Head in the UK had over 32,000 of them arrive in what the observer described as one of the biggest Redwing movements recorded in recent times and the most impressive thing he'd seen in over 30 years of migration counting, while the well-manned site just outside The Hague somehow managed to count 255,676 Rewings going past!  By Wednesday morning, it was all over, with only 61 Redwing and very little else passing over during half an hour spent on my balcony, although a group of 5 Greylag Goose were also new for my flat list.  With all this madness going on, I just had to get to the coast and thus spent a few hours in Zeebrugge on Thursday morning before work.  There had been an obvious, overnight fall of Goldcrests, plus several Firecrests, and the aftermath of Tuesday's thrush tsunami was still evident, with groups of Redwings feeding everywhere, accompanied by one Fieldfare and this stonking Ring Ouzel.

I also found a Lesser Whitethroat, which, so late in the year, is more likely to be of the Siberian subspecies blythi, although they cannot reliably be separated from the nominate race in the field.  By Friday, things seemed to have settled down but a morning tour of my local park had me stumped as I twice heard an unusual call I didn't recognise before the unseen, calling bird seemed to move off into the walled garden of the Indian embassy.  I didn't have a clue what it was but knew I had never heard this call before so I spent most of the evening listening to various calls until I found the perfect match - a Greenish Warbler!!!  OMG, what a find that would have been but, of course, there was no trace of it this morning, although I did get home just in time to first hear and then see a group of 30+ White-fronted Geese pass over my balcony!

Feeding frenzy

My YBW/PGS/Blako ended up staying for four days, finally disappearing during the night of 7-8 October just as it did last year!  I spent some time with it every day, helping several other birders to connect with both it and the Pied Flycatcher, but I also managed a trip to the coast to look for other rarities.  I got to see the Red-breasted Flycatcher again in Zeebrugge, where there was a small fall of Song Thrushes plus my first Redwing of the winter, but failed to find the Pallas' Grasshopper Warbler, Barred Warbler and Grey Phalaropes which had been reported.  I finished up in Ostend, where the recent storms had washed up all sorts of tasty morsels onto the beach, resulting in a feeding frenzy of several hundred Herring Gulls plus a nice collection of waders.  I counted at least 6 Dunlin, 2 Sanderling, 2 Knot and 1 Bar-tailed Godwit (showing its barred tail for a change), in addition to the always photogenic and extremely confiding high tide roost of Turnstones.

Return of the PGS

On 7 October last year, I discovered a Yellow-browed Warbler aka YBW or PGS in French in my local park.  Having seen and heard several at the coast last week, I was conscious about checking my local park as often as possible just in case lightning should strike twice.  Sure enough, on Sunday morning, during a quick pre-work tour of the park, I again heard the distinctive call and discovered what is almost certainly the same bird, in the very same tree it was in just three days short of a year ago!  This time, I managed to get the news out early enough for other, Brussels-based birders to connect with it, some of whom managed to get photo's.  When I returned to admire it, a 1st-year Pied Flycatcher was in the same tree!  This post was originally going to be called One-day wonder as I had another look yesterday but neither saw nor heard it and so had presumed it had moved on.  Another birder re-found it in a different section of the park, however, and I've just spent another hour watching both it and the Pied Flycatcher on the third day of their Brussels stopover.

Ode to Odette

Storm Odette hit the Belgian coast last weekend, leaving lots of migrants in its wake, including several Siberian rarities such as Belgium's second Pallas's Grasshopper Warbler.  Even in my local park in Brussels on Tuesday morning, there was evidence of a big fall, with around ten Chiffchaffs, one or two Firecrests, a pair of Blackcaps and several newly arrived Robins.  Wednesday was my first chance to get to the coast to pick up some of the remaining pieces of the weekend's bounty and this immature Red-breasted Flycatcher was the first bird I saw upon arriving at the well-known migrant trap in Zeebrugge!  This was only my third in Belgium and, while admiring that, I could hear a Yellow-browed Warbler calling repeatedly.  It took me another hour to finally get a good look at that but, apart from Robins absoutely everywhere, I failed to find anything else of note so I then moved to the Sashul in Heist.  Here, I heard another two Yellow-browed Warblers calling but didn't see much at all.  As I headed back to the station, I saw the hourly train leaving, meaning I had a 45-minute wait on the platform.  I thus sat down facing the bushes and, within five minutes, was watching another Yellow-browed Warbler feeding right in front of me.  This was soon accompanied by a Goldcrest, a Firecrest, a Garden Warbler and a Pied Flycatcher, making my wait for the train fly by.  There can't be many train stations in the world where you can watch a Yellow-browed Warbler feeding at the right time of year!  The station was also alive with dozens of Ruddy Darters and a few butterflies, including several Speckled Woods.