Rufous to Silver

Something Adam Hutt pointed out to me a while back. How the plumage of juvenile Sand Martin varies. I got chance to see it up close and personal last week. Basically the commonest pattern on juvenile Sand Martins is of a warm brownish to rich rufous-brown fringes to the upperpart wing and tail feathers. However every so often you encounter a ‘Silver Guy’ on which the warm brown/ rufous is replaced by gleaming cold silvery white. The Silver Guys seem a lot less common and in my little sample I didn’t see and cline from one to the other but it was only a few birds.

Variety in birds is wonderful. Keep an eye out for the Silver Guys. Hopefully you can see what I mean below. Taken Spurn, August 2011.

Birdfair News

Guided Birding Pages

 updated with 2 special offers for the Birdfair see here and here.

10% off for anyone booking at Birdfair or for booking by the end of this coming weekend (by 21 August 2011)

Memory Stick

Available at the Birdfair and beyond. List here

plus articles on  Stejneger’s and White-winged Scoters, Yelkouan Shearwater update, The ID of the Albert Village Lake ‘Mew Gull’, Eastern Jackdaws in Britain, Yellow-billed Kite, Eastern Bean Geese.

n.b. Each article comes as a PDF (Portable Document Format). To open them you need Adobe Acrobat which is free to download here

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