Tricky, and not an Icky!

Last night I twitched the Icterine Warbler at Broom Wood, Tiln (north of Retford), about which news broke that morning. To be honest, I didn't get great views in my 2 hour stint; a brief full-frontal, then an obscured side view, and then a more distant view as it flew up into some large pines behind the plot of young pines and broom it was occupying. It also wasn't singing as well as apparently it had been, with long periods of silence. But hey, I'd seen it. But when talk started last night that the bird was in fact a Melodious Warbler - a bird I need for my British list - I decided that I had to go back and have another look; certainly, photos online suggested its primary projection was on the short side, and comparing Icky with Melody on Xeno-Canto also suggested the bird's song was more like the latter than the former...

So back I went today; the bird was singing much more frequently and I did see it a bit better than yesterday, but with the windy conditions it was generally staying quite low down and out of sight. I grabbed a couple of rubbish photos, but couldn't really get a good look at the key features, e.g. primary projection. At one point, it was singing just a few metres away, but remained invisible!

The song is quite interesting; repetitive, quite Acro-like at times, with apparent mimicry (e.g. Sedge Warbler, Blackbird 'startle' call). I got some good recordings of the wind on my Remembird, but also a few snippets of song, which I've converted to spectrograms (below). Interestingly, I understand it responded to Icterine Warbler song playback when it was first ID'd, but not Melodious, but then did respond to Melodious playback yesterday. But this is all hearsay.