Dear All,
I was in the back paddock this morning here at home. There was a very
noisy dawn chorus from shortly after 6.00am, but by about 7.15am the
normal bird routine is to all suddenly shut up, presumably to feed.
Towards 8.00am there is a resumption of bird noise and often involving
species that were not calling earlier on. So from around 7.15-near
8.00am it can be very quiet in this calm period.
At 7.30am during the quiet period, I became aware of a shrill call,
vaguely similar to a Yellow Wagtail but sounded louder and more
explosive and emphatic and shorter, a “shreech.”  In reality it
sounded little like a Yellow Wagtail. It was also given continuously
for the entire time it was passing over, at a rate in excess of every
second, whereas Yellow Wagtails frequency sounds greater than a second
between calls which sounds more relaxed than anxious if that makes any
sense. After scanning the sky for the author, as I had more than just
an idea of what I was hearing, I found the bird coming in from the
north quite high, and coming straight for me. I could see that the
bird was indeed a Wagtail, and the tail was much the proportion of
yellow. The underparts were pale. It flew over me keeping on a very
direct course, staying high and heading southwards without any falter
to its path. Because the bird was so high and heard coming well before
it was in sight, it seemed to be taking a long while from arrival to
out of sight.
This is really just a heads-up, there is nothing that could ever be
done with such a record, but I am sure this bird was a Citrine
Wagtail, which I last saw in numbers in Oman five years ago but not
since. Many calls of Citrine are so very similar to Yellow Wagtail,
but it also has a short quite loud “shreech’ that is not shared with
Yellow.
I went inside and played recordings of Citrine Wagtail, which included
Yellow-like and the different short harsh call which lacks the
whistled quality of flava. The bird I had heard sounded the same as
recordings from Middle East.
In Kenya disappearing towards Tanzanian air-space it would be more
than a needle in a haystack to locate with all the open country in
between. Whilst RSA has had two very nice terrestrial Ctrine Wagtails,
East Africa has never recorded it, and it has only been recorded as a
vagrant to Ethiopia.
The record is a sad loss, but it is worth remembering to keep Citrine
in mind when faced with many migrant wagtails, and it won’t be long
before the first birds are heading back towards Kenya.
At 6.00pm a Bat Hawk flew past the window, very noisy and chasing a
Pied Crow. The last one I saw a week ago was also coming out on top,
in a Pied Crow encounter, which is very good to see!

Best to all
Brian