Most quiet time of the year – anyway a self-found tick
February is always the quietest time of the year for birding. And if some place is quiet, Parikkala is! So I didn’t do much birding; it was dark when I went to work and when I got away from work anyway. Then I had too many other things to do at weekends.
On the 4th of February I had to visit Lappeenranta hospital where a doctor checked my ear for the first time after the surgery. After 1 p.m. I was free to go birding and I visited Pappilanniemi where I didn’t see a Nuthatch and Tirilä where I didn’t see any Hawfinches. So I decided to call to Sampsa Cairenius and ask him to go with me to Joutseno Pätilä where had been thousands of Yellowhammers. Luckily Sampsa was free to join me as I didn’t have my scope with me.
In Pätilä I parked to the field road and we continued to walk to the middle of the field. Soon I noticed a bird perched on a top of a dead tree behind the fields and with scope we could identify it as a Merlin! And soon we found huge flocks of Yellowhammers! There had been even 500 birds in the best days but also now there were at least 1500 or 2000 of them.
After we had checked the flocks pretty well we decided to continue to check some of the closest feeders. We found more Yellowhammers and a Chaffinch but nothing else. In Hyvättilä we found also 500 Yellowhammers but in Konnunsuo we saw no birds at all. It was already getting dark when we decided to drive back to Pätilä where almost all Yellowhammers had already gone. Some small flocks were still flying towards the buildings to roost. Then suddenly we heard a powerful “tick” -calls, a little bit like a Quail but clearly a bunting anyway. We both concentrated to listen and when the bird was already pretty far we tried to find it from the sky but we never saw it. It had clearly been a Corn Bunting! I had heard many Corn Bunting abroad and Sampsa had still a couple of weeks ago heard them in Germany. I had a cd of birds flight calls on my car and we immediately compared the call to the Corn Bunting calls and it had been exactly similar! We decided to put the news out and hope that someone else than Sampsa would be there early on the next morning too.
On Tuesday Sampsa was checking all the buntings again but the weather was windy and cold and he counted 2500 Yellowhammers, 30 Chaffinches, a Brambling, a Wood Pigeon and a Merlin again. On Wednesday there was probably nobody in Pätilä but on Thursday Sampsa was there again and in the afternoon he finally found the Corn Bunting! Sampsa found it from the call again but this time it was perched in a bush with many Yellowhammers. So Sampsa managed to digiscope it too. Soon the bird flushed and flew to the feeders. On these days I was of course working but in Kangaskylä I saw a Black Woodpecker and a Great Grey Shrike.
On Friday I left from work at mid-day and as I was going to Helsinki, I drove straight to Joutseno, picked up Sampsa again and then we continued to Pätilä. There were already 2 birders searching for the bunting but they hadn’t seen anything better. Soon we found the Wood Pigeon which actually was the first ever in mid-winter in South Karelia! Then the Merlin came to chase the Yellowhammers which were again a couple of thousand there. After some time we decided to check the feeders again but found only more Yellowhammers and 5 Chaffinches. So soon we drove back to the fields.
After a couple of hours two twitchers came from the western coast (another one of them was InvicibleManfromCorvo) and they had hardly got out from the car when Sampsa shouted that he had the Corn Bunting in his scope! He gave us all to see the bird through his scope and it was showing pretty well. But it was really difficult to tell where it really was as the tree was absolutely full of Yellowhammers! Luckily I managed to find it pretty soon a I got a couple of pictures and a short video before it left with whole flock to the field. I was really feeling cold already so I decided to continued my long drive to Kirkkonummi. The other birders still stayed there but the Corn Bunting wasn’t seen again. But on the next days there were more and more twitchers going to Pätilä and at least most of the twitchers managed to see the Corn Bunting again. Only bird I saw was an Eagle Owl that I saw in Lappeenranta on my way back home from Helsinki.
J.A.