Jonathmartinez

the barring pattern of the inner secondaries is wrong for Pallid Harrier.

Jonathmartinez

Martin, I'm far to be an harrier specialist, but per my understanding on Pallid Harrier the barring is different on the inner secondaries where the pale bar become darker, where they're having the same paleness on Pied and other Harrier with similar secondaries pattern...

Jonathmartinez

Martin, me again, I'd said you've open my mind and I've made a bit of more search on internet and I would tend to agree that the barring seems to be quite variable on immature bird.
I also think that the pale grey appearing on the neck is probably some first sign of the adult plumage. Svenson mention that some 1st summer male start to moult quite early in march...so it fits quite well with this bird. I also think that the same grey on the neck and the well defined collar seems to be wrong for a light female Pied...So why not a 1st summer Male Pale Harrier...

Jonathmartinez

I would have said a bird in its second calendar year, and very likely a male due to the grey feather appearing on the neck...
I don't know what to think about the wing formula, does'nt look that far to me from Pallid, from the picture I can found on the net, same on the amount of black on primary tip.
Here a few links showing ineteresting looking bird :
http://www.netfugl.dk/pictures.p ... mp;picture_id=54714
(interesting comments from Klaus Malling Olsen translatedd with google translate for the one who don't read danish:-)
http://orientalbirdimages.org/se ... _ID=&pagesize=1

Jonathmartinez

I would said that on the danish bird P1 looks shorter because the bird is on direct flight as on the one from LV seems to be a bit more hoovering as the bird does when looking for prey, but to me on both birds P1 is just slightly shorter than P5 that seems to fit Pallid...
Klaus Malling Olsen in his comment said that many of these "steppe" bird are showing a lof of variation in plumage with bird more reddish and other much paler and to him the danish bird is almost an extreme in term of paleness....that would also explain why the primary tip does not look so dark and why the pale bar on inner primaries are so pale....
I also would said that the angle of the bird in the pictures are not the best to appreciate primaries lenght accuratly....

Jonathmartinez

more good feature for Pallid to me :
- the pale area on the median covert on the upperwing as shows Montagu's, Hen and Pallid but not Pied
- P5 is not stronly digited and just slightly longer than P6 given the impression that only 4 primaries are digited, on Hen and Pied it should be much more digited and show 5 clearly digited primaries, it seems that on Pied P5 ended at about 3/4 of the distance between P6 and P4 where  on Pallid it just reach half distance... I think our bird fit this feature quite well, so to me this rule out Hen and Pied
- starting from P6 primaries are having more pale tip, and it seems that this is ruling out Montagu's...

Having said that I would go for Pallid...