Darryl and his Canadian friend!

Today it happened again! After kicking different valleys in the morning a few of us were going to have lunch at the picnic site in Fojo. As I was on my way there I picked up some intense radio traffic going on with directions on how to get to the bird so I started to run and try to find the right place - without knowing what species they were talking about! As I was almost there I radioed them and got to know that Darryl had found a Canada Warbler just north of the picnic site! Unfortunately the bird had disappeared and we had to search hard. After abut an hour Ferran picked it up and the look on his face was very similar to a childs on Christmas eve. Unfortunately the bird disappeared again before the rest of us arrived... Later Darryl saw the bird briefly again and after totally three hours everyone finally got excellent views as Pete refound the bird feeding in the middle of the wood. Absolute magic!

CANADA WARBLER!

Read about the discovery on Darryls blog: http://gwentbirding.blogspot.com/
Pete has put some film of the twitch (mostly showing my ass) on his blog: http://peteralfreybirdingnotebook.blogspot.com/

Eric celebrating his 703rd WP species.

On the way back me and Fred checked the lower parts of Ribeira da Poso de Agua. That place looks really, really good and I look forward to seeing something there... sometime... Found a Cory's nest down there with an almost fully grown chick in it. Soon we will be picking them up from the streets in the village but I decided to have a preview.

Juvenile Cory's Shearwater.

Me trying to pull out the Cory's chick that was doing its very best to fight back! Photo by Fred.

According to Pete the occurance of vagrants in Newfoundland correlated pretty good with what turned up in the Azores in autumn 2005, so you better take a look at Newfoundland Rare Bird Alert every now and then: http://groups.google.com/group/nf.birds/topics?lnk=srg&pli=1Thanks to Dave Brown for providing the link.

Birds

Canada Warbler 1!