Birding app discovery

My home-bound travel arrangements are all now fixed. Tony is ferrying my to the Hostal Pensimar in El Altet on Monday afternoon, a short taxi ride from Alicante Airport, and an 08.30 check-in. It gives a cheap, clean, quiet, bed for the night, with shops and restaurants a few minutes walk away for an evening meal. All I need, before facing up to the British cold and damp.

Before lunch yesterday, I visited the bridge over the charco, and saw that there a few more egrets were roosting along the banks. From a family of three over the past months, the number has grown to ten. The pair of Dabs and their growing chick were out together, and I narrowly missed getting a photo of all three in the same place at the same time. They move quickly and are so busy diving for food, even the chick and more so as it develops. No wonder the little nuclear family is hard to snap. 

The visiting cormorant with a white front is still there, but on its own. If it was a breeding female, it would normally be with other females. I believe it's too well developed and too large for a juvenile that can also have a white front. So what is it? 

Among the countless warblers and handful of white wagtails seen daily darting in an out of the cane forest along the banks, I got a good photo a bird directly below me, paused on a patch of reed. I took it for a white wagtail, until I looked at the resulting photo. Another puzzle, as the colouring is not the same, and the tail longer and broader, with a black stripe near the tip. Again, what is it? 

I hunted for help with identification online, and found the excellent Ornithopaedia Europe Android app. It's a huge database of over a thousand bird species which can be searched by country, and presumed bird name in over thirty languages, with photos and bird-song samples. I remember this time last year meeting a Spanish visitor on the bridge and attempting to chat with him in Spanish, trying to identify a bird across the language barrier. He had this app on his iPhone, and I didn't bother to check if there was an Android equivalent. How foolish of me. It's free to download as well. Such a public spirited offering of high quality data, and no intrusive advertising either.

Anyway, the Spanish app selection showed me the possibility that the mystery Cormorant could be the White Breasted variant. When breeding is done, Cormorants tend to want their own space, like Herons, not like little Egrets which often hang out together and travel in family groups. Mallard couples are often seen together, and with their chicks. Multitudes of Coots inhabit the same space, and seem to spend a lot of time noisily aggressing each other. So many behavioural differences, just like humans.

The other discovery from the app was that my other distinctive mystery bird is a grey wagtail. Glad to have that sorted. I can see this piece of software is going to come in very handy in future.