Redwing - Portland Bill, 15th March 2016 © Martin Cade
...we'd hazard a guess that this very swarthy-looking bird that pitched in briefly in the Crown Estate Field was a coburni Icelandic Redwing; it stuck out like a sore thumb, being far more heavily marked than the usual iliacus Scandinavian birds that make up the overwhelming majority of passage/winter Redwings at Portland. In 26 years of catching Redwings at the Obs we've never handled a completely convincing candidate for coburni (we have got a few photographs of maybes which we'll try and dig out and review in the light of today's experience) and aren't aware of any substantiated field records during that period. In the earlier days of the Obs references to this form crop up more frequently, particularly in the ringing log, where 'coburni' - without further details - is pencilled in the margin quite often; although the usually longer wing of coburni is seemingly by no means a certain discriminant in the distinguishing process, in a scan through 40 years of ringing data before we compiled these notes we could only spot three birds with a wing length greater than 125mm - of these a bird on 12th November 1983 with a wing of 127mm (as well as a weight of 72gms which puts it right at the top end of Portland weights) which was identified as a coburni by Mick Rogers does sound to be a very plausible candidate.