Passing through Aberdeenshire on
our way home nicely coincided with Andy Carroll finding a Common Nightingale of an easterly origin at Rattray Head. On seeing a couple of the first online images
of it, as it was clearly a striking bird, I was very keen to see it... During
the hour or so that we were present, it made frequent brief appearances in the
garden of the old coastguard cottages and adjacent gorse mound. The colour of
its upperparts, dark loral smudge, lack of a whitish eye-ring, broad whitish fringes/tips to
its median and greater coverts, frosty tips to its uppertail-coverts and long tail, all
combined to give it a very distinctive appearance. Common Nightingale is
typically treated as comprising three forms. The two forms of easterly origin (africana
and golzii) intergrade in south Iran (Shirihai & Svensson 2018). Quite
rightly, there is some debate as to whether the strength of the bird’s
supercilium falls within the variation that can be shown by golzii. Here
is a link to an image of what appears a comparable first-winter trapped in
Kazakhstan being within the breeding range of golzii.
Common Nightingale of an easterly origin at Rattray Head
