Still too busy to blog properly...

Rich and Stephen did the early morning shift round Alftanes/Hafnarfjordur/Seltjarnarnes today leaving me with some time to catch up on data entry (and a little bit of sleep!). The racked up an impressive 125 resightings in this time alone, which meant we decided to make a trip recce trip up to Blautos in the afternoon. It was low tide and birds were scattered all over the estuary/lagoon with none in the fields, so we explored northwards around Grunnafjordur and whilst not finding many geese had a good opportunity to learn the layout of the area and the key roads/tracks to use. At one point we had breathtaking flyby views of a hunting Short-eared Owl that stopped to investigate the car a couple of times. Rich has some awesome pictures that will hopefully be on his computer and stealable soon! After this we headed back to Blautos and spent some time reading some rings on the estuary and on the saltmarsh near  the stables, although many birds were on the far side and out of range of our scopes. Still it was a useful recce trip and we plan on heading back closer to high tide to assess whether it would be a good field site for our social networks stuff soon. The evening saw another tour round our Alftanes route with plenty more resightings and focal watches recorded along the way.

Otherwise, there is relatively little to report from the previous couple of days. Fieldwork still seems to be progressing well  (after today we're up to about 1600 resightings of nearly 500 different colour-ringed geese, and have recorded close to 100 of our five minute behavioural focal samples) and there have been a smattering of birding highlights along the way. An adult/near adult Kumlien's type gull at Seltjarnarnes yesterday was nice, and I have also picked out a couple of apparent GlaucousXHerring hybrids at a couple of sites. At Seltjarnarnes one of these was flying up to drop and break open shellfish on the rocks along the shoreline which was quite cool to watch. Goose wise the Black Brant still remains at Alftanes and yesterday we found a putative Grey-bellied Brant to go with it (pictures on the way soon hopefully), with a smattering of dark-bellied brents and the same small group of barnacle geese also still amongst the pale bellies.

Hopefully more to come soon....