Citril Finch from Spain to Britain?

A Citril Finch has recently been found on Fair Isle, making it the latest “first” on the British list. Of course its finding has sparked a lot of interest, comments and hurried plane and ferry bookings!  Especially seeing  that it has been kind enough to stay  around and let the  twitchers catch up with it (is it still there?).

Naturally, conjectures fly about where it came from and how it got to the remote Fair Isle in the North Sea. It seems unlikely that we will ever know what strange mechanism was at work to make a Citril Finch, a short distance and vertical migrant with the nearest breeding areas located in Switzerland, to take flight, head northwards over Europe and then out over the North Sea to Fair Isle.

There is a possibility that the Citril Finch in question did not originate from Switzerland, but rather from even further afield, from the Spanish Pyrenees. I wouldn’t be surprised. When I was with the Naturetrek Catalonia tour on the edge of the Aigüestortes National Park on the 9th May we saw a good number of Citril Finches. And not at the normal altitudes of 1,800m or above, but rather around the nearby villages and at altitudes of 1,300m, and even less.

What’s more, at the beginning of June the Park’s guards had to postpone the traditional census of Ptarmigan and Capercaillie because of the inaccessibility of their mountain haunts. Apparently the north-facing slopes had 2 metres of snow!

Wouldn’t that be reason enough for a Citril Finch to get the wander lust?

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