I have popped up to have a look at it on a couple of occasions over the past month and have been rewarded with some of the most memorable views of a bird of prey that I have ever enjoyed, at times having it fly past just 20 feet or so over my head. With its slow, languid glide and constant tail-twisting it is a real treat to watch, so do try to get up and have a look at it while it is still around. There have been several other nice birds seen in the area during the kite’s stay, including a flock of 48 Pink-footed Geese reported from nearby Cruisetown Strand and a group of approx. two dozen Velvet Scoters that have spent the winter with a flock of their more common cousins off Clogher Head (still present just this past weekend), so all the ingredients are there for a fine day’s birding if you decide to make the short trip up the N1.

Niall Hatch

Thayer’s Gull in Co. Donegal

Rarely observed away from its mainly Californian wintering grounds, this gull has long posed a classification puzzle for ornithologists and taxonomists. Once considered a race of Herring Gull, and more recently of Iceland Gull, Thayer’s Gull is currently considered a valid species in its own right. In all plumages it looks very like a Herring Gull, though practically identical in size and structure to the slightly smaller, thinner-billed and more graceful-looking Iceland Gull, and is a notoriously difficult bird to identify in all but the most clear-cut of cases. Fortunately the Killybegs bird was just one such case, literally a textbook example, resembling a young Herring Gull but with slightly more uniform brown head and underparts, a contrasting dark and pale ‘chequerboard’ appearance to the folded wings, a thick dark tail band and, crucially, extremely pale (almost white, in fact) undersides to its flight feathers.

I suppose for those not overly wild about gulls it’s not exactly the most different or exciting looking bird in the world, but it does mark a very important record for Europe and confirms Killybegs’ reputation as perhaps the continent’s premier gull-watching spot. Stephen McAvoy and I made the long trip up to Donegal to have a look for the bird, and while we were looking through the thousands of Kittiwakes and Herring, Common, Great Black-backed and Black-headed Gulls we managed to see several Iceland Gulls (including one of the North American race) and Glaucous Gulls at very close range without any difficulty whatsoever. Also present were several Herring Gulls of the Scandinavian race, a Yellow-legged Gull and a Ring-billed Gull. We also eventually had great views of the Thayer’s, perched obligingly atop a fish factory roof, but only after several hours of methodical scanning and searching every single bird we could find: not to everyone’s taste, I know. It has continued to show intermittently around the Killybegs area throughout the past month, often around the upper estuary where the curiously-named Bungosteen River flows into the harbour, though has often proven hard to locate, due in the main, no doubt, to the huge numbers of other gulls present and the movements of fishing vessels.

Niall Hatch

Elegant Tern in Co. Kerry

On Friday 18th October a very unusual tern was observed in Dingle Harbour, Co. Kerry. Rather similar in appearance to a Sandwich Tern (itself an unusual bird to see in Ireland at this time of year) due to its large size and shaggy drooping crest, what first made this bird stand out as something special was its long orange bill. This is a feature not shown by any of the common Irish tern species (Sandwich Tern has a black bill with a yellow tip, for example), but is a feature of some other species found in more exotic climes. Roughly similar in size to a Black-headed Gull, at the time of writing this bird continues to be seen feeding in the Dingle area and roosting with gulls along the rocky shore near the harbour.

An unusual tern indeed, but what species? Several ‘orange-billed’ terns are seen in European waters each year, and the means of separating the species are not fully understood. The most frequent of these vagrants to occur in Europe appears to be Lesser Crested Tern, a species normally confined to Asia and Australia but which has bred in Europe in the past, and it was initially thought that the Dingle tern probably belonged to that species. Continued observation and photography revealed however that the Dingle bird has a white rump (Lesser Crested Tern ordinarily has a grey rump) and a longer, more drooping bill than one would expect from that species. After much debate the consensus seems to be that this bird is most likely a 2nd-year Elegant Tern. This species normally breeds on the Pacific coast of Mexico (with 90% of the whole population breeding on a single island in the Gulf of California) and spends the winter from California in the north to central Chile in the south.

Elegant Terns usually prefer to feed in sheltered lagoons, bays and harbour areas, perhaps explaining the behaviour of the bird in Dingle and its fondness for staying near to the town. Almost exclusively a coastal species, these birds dislike flying over open sea out of sight of land and have rarely been recorded inland. It is remarkable, therefore, that this bird appears to have crossed both a continent and a few thousand kilometres of the ‘wrong’ ocean to make its way to our shores. What is even more remarkable is that, if accepted, this will be the third record of this Pacific vagrant in Ireland - the first was observed in Co. Down and Co. Cork in 1982, the second in Co. Wexford in 1999.

- Niall Hatch