Rome, Sardinia and Corsica

"Finally", me and my girlfriend are back from our trip to the fabulous islands in the South. It wasn't just a birding trip but.. what can I say, how easy is it not to birdwatch at islands like that?! We saw almost everything we wanted. This includes Audouin's Gull, Marmora's Warbler, Corsican Finch, Lammergeier, Corsican Nuthatch and Barbary Partridge. Are you going there and want some information about good places, write me!
Just a few days before our flight back home the vulcano on Iceland started throwing out ash. But yesterday we came home, 24 days after going away and five days too late. We needed to take a bus from Rome.

In Sweden I changed to train and when I sat there in my train on the Malmoe train station I saw a 2cy cachinnans flying by. What can you do when you're in a train, run after it? But fortunately it landed on a lamppost and I managed to take some pics trough my binoculars! A nice ending to the trip.

IGM on Crete in November

The next (and 10th) International Gull Meeting (IGM) will be on Crete the 24th to the 28th of November 2010. Most of the gulling will take place at Herakleion, where the talks will be on the Natural History Museum of Crete. Crete should be one of the most interesting places in the Western Palearctic for gulling, I quote:

"Yellow-legged and Black-headed, also Mediterranean, Caspian, Baltic, Lesser Black-backed, Heuglin's are easy and in most cases Armenian, Slender-billed, Little and Audouini's gulls are present. Pallas Gull is a vagrant with good chance to be present too, other taxa/forms are either vagrants or still unconfirmed for the site."

The leader of the meeting will be Michalis Dretakis, who's been gulling on Crete for several years and has a nice gull website, http://gullsofcrete.blogspot.com/, where you can read about the next IGM and see some nice pix of the gulls of Crete.
To be able to negotiate for better hotel prices, Michalis would like to know the approximate number of participants as quick as possible. And, if you'd like to make a talk, send him an e-mail at dretakmi@yahoo.com!

To see the place, click here.

I hope to see you there!
//Oskar

Additional pix of the michahellis in Simrishamn

Some more pix of the 1cy michahellis that visited the harbour in Simrishamn on the 14th of August.

This image is uploaded to show how the general appearance of a gull can vary due to different situations.

Some michahellis tertials

Here follows some pix of juvenile Yellow-legged Gull tertials from Lesvos, Greece in July 2009. They are put in order from the least patterned to the most. The first three or four pictures represent the commonest tertial patterns of michahellis.