Savi's Warbler 120511

From being an expected annual visitor - and presumably breeder - to the Weymouth area just a generation ago, Savi's Warbler has become something of a gross rarity in the modern era so we made a couple visits to Lodmoor at either end of the day to hear this bird singing and hopefully make some recordings; click here to have a listen to one of the recordings of it made in the evening.(and for comparison click here to listen to a recording of a singing Grasshopper Warbler at the Bill in 2009). Although the differences between the two songs are perfectly obvious to the ear, we did make a couple a couple of quick sonograms of 10 second sequences of each which show quite nicely the differences in pitch (around 4kHz in Savi's and 6kHz in Grasshopper) as well as the much more condensed nature of the reeling in Savi's (to our ears it sounds more like a buzz since the individual notes can't be distinguished from one another, whereas each note is clearly distinguishable when you listen to a Grasshopper Warbler).

Update from 27th May. Later in the month the bird was still present and showing much better than it had been when it first arrived: