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| My favourite from a rather gripping series of photos! |
I actually had quite high hopes for our outing on 8th May as a mild south-easterly was forecast, with the potential for some rain later in the morning. Sadly this never materialised, but the overcast sky was a nice change from the blazing anticyclonic conditions that have characterised the last few weeks (and baked dry the Port Meadow floods). A walk down the bridleway and a check of Big Otmoor failed to produce anything interesting to show other than some Cuckoos and Hobbies, so we walked to the first screen. Ben soon joined me with his group of students.
At around 10:20am I was scanning the sky with bins when I noticed an odd-looking raptor. It was extremely distant (well beyond the flood field) but initially quite low over the trees, heading towards the church on the horizon. What drew me to it was its shape - it looked to have a squared-off tail, but was quite compact and broad-winged, so not a Marsh Harrier. I could see no plumage details other than the fact that it was dark, and to be honest even this was hard to see as it was a complete speck. I called Ben over and clearly he noticed the urgency in my voice, although at this point I didn't think it would turn out to be anything particularly unusual.
It began circling higher and higher heading north, and although Ben could just about see it as a dot in his bins he couldn't locate it using his new stabilised Swarovski scope! I opted to try and take photos instead, although the camera was struggling to focus with the subject being so small. Thankfully I already had the 2x extender on, so I hoped I would be able to capture some detail using the 1200mm equivalent field of view (24x magnification). I held the shutter button down and took around 200 photos. I then tried to get some views of it using one of the other scopes that we had brought - after a couple of minutes I eventually found it in the sky, although I was really struggling - and by that point it was already extremely distant and flying away from us, so I could see nothing useful on it. I lost the bird in the clouds a couple of minutes after initially picking it up.
I had a look through my photos and was confused. I was finding it difficult to review them properly and take back-of-camera shots in the strong sunlight, so I tried to find some shade. It looked like a Black Kite, which is what my gut instinct had told me even through bins, but it seemed to have quite a strong upperwing pattern (more like a Red Kite) and I was wondering if I could see a hint of rufous in the plumage. I also thought that the tail was very worn, and possibly squared-off due to a break along a fault bar rather than that being its natural shape? However, the structure was undeniable, with six fingers and shorter, broader-tipped wings than a Red Kite. It was also not in moult, contrary to most of the Red Kites.
Since the bird was long gone I decided to send the back-of-camera photos to a few friends and wait for feedback rather than put out news immediately, as I had significant doubts. It was so distant that I was worrying about camera artefacts and distortion making it look more interesting in the photos than it actually was, especially given the lack of real field views through optics. I did think that it was unlikely to just be a weird-looking Red Kite, but could a hybrid be eliminated? Or maybe I was totally wrong? Despite Ben being very enthusiastic about it being a Black Kite from just a brief look at the photos, I wanted to examine them properly on a computer screen before making a call this big. Black Kite is a properly rare bird in Oxfordshire (although several have been claimed this is likely to be only the third substantive record), and I had never seen one in Britain before.
We headed back along the bridleway and Steve Lavington was the first to respond to my photos with a cautious thumbs up for Black Kite. Then, things got really interesting when Tom Bedford sent through this message.
Less than ten minutes before our sighting! I looked up from my phone and standing not far from me was, presumably, the person who reported the bird - looking over Greenaways with his bins and scope. I hurried up to him and asked if he had seen anything. "Had a Black Kite earlier" "Seems like we did as well!" and showed him the photos. Apparently, he had seen it at relatively close range initially through bins and then at length through a scope, as it came from the south west and flew first east and then north over Greenaways. Congratulations all around, and he introduced himself as Robert Crofton, from Gloucestershire. Although I still had a grain of doubt, his independent sighting and identification bolstered my confidence a bit, so I decided to post my back-of-camera photos to the Oxon WhatsApp group as a probable Black Kite, and included information about Robert's earlier observation. Ian Lewington had also replied by this point and said that it looked pretty good to him, although with the bird at such distance I should be a bit cautious with the photos.
However, upon getting back to Wytham and downloading them to my computer any worries I had about the identification of the bird were alleviated. I always find that back-of-camera photos look a bit weird - I think the camera applies some JPG-level processing when generating the preview, with sharpening artefacts and increased contrast often apparent. This is of course compounded when taking photos of the screen with a phone, as this applies a second level of automatic processing. My photos viewed on the computer were actually quite blurry compared to what I was expecting from the back-of-camera preview (in fact, most had missed focus), but otherwise showed a bog-standard Black Kite - the strong upperwing pattern and hints of other spurious features were simply artefacts on the back-of-camera shots. In one photo, the upperwing does look rather pale, but I think this was the bird catching a ray of strong sunlight through the cloud. Indeed, it looks much darker in all the other photos, and even then the colour is more bleached light-brown rather than rufous. I am happy that this bird shows all features which support its identification as a Black Kite - six-fingered wing formula, compact overall structure with much more shallowly-forked tail than Red Kite, brown tail concolorous with the upperparts, relatively muted upperwing pattern, and lack of strong primary panel on the underwing. It was just a shame that it wasn't closer!
I've included a selection of the better photos here, completely unedited, which I think is important for a record like this. My usual denoising and sharpening process would just introduce artefacts with the bird being so small in the frame and soft due to heat haze. The last one is an example of what the photo looked like without any cropping - with the field of view being at 24x magnification. Now imagine seeing the bird a third of this size through 8x bins, which are the field views that we got! Despite the photos being objectively rubbish I think it's still quite a gripping series - which is perhaps true of many evocative shots of rarities...
I think that this event demonstrates the importance nowadays of carrying a camera when out birding - not only for obtaining a record shot of a bird that has already been identified, but also resolving the identification and documenting something that would have otherwise escaped detection. Arguably neither Ben nor I got tickable views in the field. If we had heard about the independent report afterwards, without our own photos I don't think either of us would have said that we saw the bird.
I would also like to take this opportunity to apologise to anyone at Otmoor who felt that I withheld news of the Black Kite from them. Hopefully this account demonstrates why it was not twitchable in any way, and short of actually being at the reedbed with us there would have been no way of seeing it (and even then, it would have been difficult). We had essentially no useful field views of the bird. At the end of the day, I wasn't sure until I had looked properly at the photos and didn't want to put out a stringy report - it was also long gone anyway by the time word had filtered through of Robert's earlier sighting. In general, I make an effort to try and put out news of any rare bird I find as quickly as possible, and act in a transparent way upon doing so - unlike several people in this county.
After my musings about county listing at the end of my last blog post I'm so happy to add a self-found UK lifer so soon after wondering what my next county tick would be. Now away for a week on Copeland with the field course so fingers crossed that nothing else turns up!
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| View across Mew Island from Lighthouse Island, as I write this blog post |
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