Chasing a Siberian pipit

News filtered into my brain yesterday that a japonicus buff-bellied pipit had been spotted down the road at Viken! Initially identified as meadow pipit on Sunday, it almost slipped through the net until photographs of the bird allowed a re-identification but unfortunately too late for birders to get to the bird yesterday. japonicus is a splendid candidate for a split I think and although I have seen it in Japonica, I thought it might be more than educational to have a good look at this one. [I am so far out of the loop re Swedish vagrants I had no idea there were prior Scandinavian records of japonicus].

I never twitched to excess in the UK, compiling a very modest list of just over 400 in thirty years, and do even less in Sweden now that BK-listing has taken a grip, but it still excites me. The anxious feeling in the pit of the stomach as soon as you realise that you are going for a bird was still there. I was not confident of seeing the bird but the reality was rather worse...

Hitting Viken at 0900 it was apparent that there were very few birders chasing this mega today and that it was too cold (minus 13) to wait around looking at an empty beach for too long. I worked the beach south towards Domsten without scoring the pipit but did pick up 35 coot (my first since October), a redshank and 25 woodpigeon.

Teaming up with Mikael Olofsson and the rest of Team Lund I headed north to check out a Mediterranean gull reported at nearby Lerberget. No sign of the gull when we arrived but it was immediately apparent that an exciting number of pipits were present. We started going through them and I had a brief glimpse of a possible japonicus candidate but it quickly disappeared. We spent two hours trying to pin it down before I had to head off. In that time two of us had another inconclusive view of the possible japonicus before I located the Med gull hunkered down in a stream outflow and we at least got a good view of that. Very frustrating to see the pipit so fleetingly that we could do nothing with it. UTV! Of course by the time I got home in the late evening at least two observers had seen the same bird at Lerberget, one well enough to claim it as the buff-bellied. I know where I am going tomorrow...