A wasted birding session and an interesting fact on my Ogden Chiffchaff.

With an afternoon child minding I arranged to drop the grand daughter off at Kebroyd again and have a second bash at Baitings Reservoir a few miles further on the road. It was 1600 hrs as I sat in traffic at Kings Cross, then even more traffic through Sowerby Bridge so by the time I,d got to Kebroyd my neck was pumping, how do people do this every day? Delivery made and on to Ripponden towards Baitings with yet more traffic then the icing on the cake was pulling into the car park at Baitings to find it was drug dealing day full of unsavory looking scumbags so rather than risk leaving the car there it was an about turn and head back to Queensbury, so after an hour and a halves travelling and 2 gallon of petrol I still had no birds to blog.
But, every cloud has a silver lining, or as my old foreman used to say, every silver lining has a cloud.
Fortunately tonights blog was saved courtesy David Crawshaw who showed an interest in last nights blog regarding my Ogden Chiffchaff.
                                                          This bird was showing the feathers above the bill encrusted which I put down to feeding on sticky buds or some other sticking item but sharp eyed DC picked up on it and kindly e mailed me via DJS saying that this is a common feature of newly arrived migrants and is picked up from where they have been feeding on the way here, probably Southern Spain, and is often a sticky deposit from Cystus or similar plants. Ive just looked this plant up and it is classed as a Spanish sticky shrub.
Many thanks to David for his interest in the blog and his sharp eye for picking this out and relaying the information on.,
Below are some cropped photos of the encrusted facial area.

BS