Gotta Cachi Haul!
On Friday, with a reasonably noteworthy uptick in Pallid Harrier reports starting, I decided on conducting a trawl though Siuntio and Inkoo in the hopes of digging some harriers out.
As I used to do in the past I decided to start out at Lohja dump, just on the off chance.
Lohja has been very hit and miss in recent years.
When I first started birding it 12 years ago it was ok. You got a small number of gulls and I managed to dig out the odd Caspian Gull from time to time.
As many dumps have started to do, they build a covered warehouse for food waste storage, and numbers of birds dropped off.
Then that warehouse burned down (it wasn't me, I swear), and for a couple of years they returned to dumping food waste in the open, and the number of gulls skyrocketed. Several Caspian Gulls a season became normal.
They rebuilt the warehouse eventually, and things dwindled off again.
I managed one juv Caspian there last year, which stayed for all of 15 minutes.
So I wasn't holding out much hope when I pulled in Friday.
I rolled up to the warehouse and there were some 30-40 gulls present. Nothing in amongst them.
There's a new bio-gas plant there with a run off pool, down near the entrance. The gas dome is stained white from gull shite, and I could see some birds up on it, so I rolled back downhill to check these, figuring it would be a bust and I'd carry on to open country.
I was wrong.
As I pulled up, I could see a nice set of mantle and scapular feathers and tertials.
That's gotta be a Casp... show me the head please.
Annnnnd bingo... can't argue with that really. Still be nice to see the tail and underwing too though. I'm sure if I wait a bit an obliging Goshawk or rubbish truck will get them to lift.
10 seconds later...
Mmmm. It's perfect.
Tail and underwing. Chef's kiss 😘.
The birds resettled after a brief flap around. The dome sides are quite steep, and so I drove around to the other side of it where the birds were sitting.
The light was against me here, but sure enough there the bird was.
Quite pleased with this result and having already put the news out, I noticed a few other juv gulls up on the dome, and started to have a look through them...uhhhh...hang on...is that another Casp?...is that two other Casps???
Though a bit more patterned and not as advanced as the first bird, they looked good.
Whilst I was momentarily distracted by a juvenile Ringed Plover which walked around my feet in the concrete yard (who knows what it was doing there), the birds lifted again and moved up to the warehouse, just as another birder arrived to twitch the first Casp.
Ringed Plover pondering it's life choices
I moved back up to the warehouse and all the gulls were camped out on the roof.
The first Caspian Gull was again the easiest to pick up.
This was quickly followed up by this second bird, the same individual photographed from the dome above.
This 3rd bird was looking good too, very leafy, and already a couple of moulted scaps.
The original bird then decided to stand up and have a preen and shuffle, and being fully in profile with nice light, I switched back to snapping that.
Caspian Gull - Juvenile - a really classic bird. Absolutely beautiful!
I then shifted to the hill, side on to the warehouse, in the hopes of getting more on these birds.
The original bird returned to his lazy ways. Whilst the second bird was initially obscured, but eventually gave a view of the paling underwing, tail and then in decent profile.
The face also just starting to pale up. No moult yet.
A thundery shower rolled in that would have terrified Noah, and the birds jumped over the roof in fright.
I rolled over to the other hill to face these. Again the first bird was the most obvious among them all.
And cropped. 😍
The birds again lifted and a good group went down to the dome again, so I followed.
Straight away, I picked up this bird I nicknamed skinny, as it's structure was so slight, dinky and long winged it approached Baltic Gull in impression. This looked good too!
Of course the birds lifted again, back up to the warehouse.
Skinny - just about to lift off.
Everything seemed to go back to the warehouse again, so back I went.
At this point things were becoming chaotic. It felt like birds were just appearing out of thin air.
It was now hours later, and I had gotten no where near any harrier habitat.
I settled on a total of 4, but there were one or two birds which maybe got away from me.
Pretty outstanding all in all, securing a new site record, up from 3 I had many years ago.
The Fantastic Four
What a weekend! 🙂
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