Shortly after I arrived for yesterday's volunteer work party, volunteer John Ellis arrived at our Portakabin having been out on site birding. I gave John the usual 'much about?' greeting, to which he responded 'a couple of probable mealy redpolls.'
If you're not familiar with mealy redpoll, it was considered to be a subspecies of redpoll, but is now considered to be a species in it's own right (though I believe some taxonomists still argue this).
The mealy redpoll (Cardeulis flammea flammea), breeds in Scandinavia and is an 'irruptive species', i.e. due to a good breeding season, failure of local food crop, or a severe winter (or a combination of any, or all of these factors), will appear in the UK in the winter.
These birds will join 'our' redpolls, the lesser redpoll (Cardeulis flammea cabaret) and, with a good view they can be told apart from each other.
The mealy redpoll is generally slighter larger than the lesser redpoll (hence the name) and is greyer than the lesser redpoll, which tends to be a more buff colour. The mealy redpoll usually has a noticeably whiter wing bar than the 'lesser' too.
Having unsuccessfully 'twitched' for mealy redpoll last winter, I headed straight out to look for them. This would be a new bird for me and therefore a 'lifer'.
John found the flock again and pointed out the relevant birds. The size and colour difference were quite obvious, once the flock had settled in a birch tree in front of us.
John kindly waited to point the birds out to the rest of the volunteers, who had arrived for the work party. By the time we got to John, Graham Gamage was also watching the birds and had his telescope trained on them (Graham had suspected a 'mealy' to be in our redpoll flock earlier in the week, but hadn't had a good enough view to be sure).
Eventually, everybody got a good view of both species and were able to compare the subtle differences.
It's always nice to start the day with a lifer! If only it would happen more often!
(Below - Sunday's volunteers pause to look at the mealy redpolls before commencing a hard day's work)