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| Black-headed Bunting Emberiza melanocephala |
After a siesta from which I awoke feeling more disoriented
than is normal, I headed back out for a circuit of 1-Gu in the mid-afternoon.
It felt very unbirdy in town - the sense of a clearout in 1-Gu was reinforced
when the banding team left early with a shrug and a “No birds.”
As I walked along
the first path above the quarry, I came across my first Yellow-rumped Flycatcher
of the spring, a cracking male. I slowly
moved in closer, when a hiker with a trail radio came by and flushed the bird
right on cue. After smiling my greeting and letting the man pass by, I waited
for a few minutes for the bird to reappear. It didn’t.
There are times when
I talk to myself, and as I gave up on the flycatcher and continued down the
path, I loosed a particularly salty stream of Québécois profanity. This outburst
flushed a chunky, tan-toned bunting from scrub at my feet. Before it landed on
the rock nearby, I knew what it was – Black-headed Bunting! This is a rare
overshoot to Korea that winters in India – definitely a species that wasn’t high
on the list of birds I was expecting to see this spring! I made sure to get
some record shots, and the bird was confiding for about 30 seconds, before it
flew straight up the quarry wall, and appeared to carry on north towards
wherever it thought it was migrating to. Tomorrow I will be swearing in French at random intervals, just to see what happens.
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