White Wagtail and Pied Wagtail: a new look
331-332 ‘White wagtail’ / ‘witte kwikstaart’ Motacilla alba/yarrellii, adult male, Nieuwpoort, Oost-Vlaanderen, Belgium, 15 March 2008 (Peter Adriaens). Similar to male alba but note extensive black rump (reaching between shortest pair of tertials). Upperparts and flanks paler than in female yarrellii. 333 ‘White wagtail’ / ‘witte kwikstaart’ Motacilla alba/yarrellii, Wijster, Drenthe, Netherlands, April 2002 (Rik Winters). Intermediate bird, similar to male alba, and perhaps that is what this is but note solid blackish rump. 334 ‘White wagtail’ / ‘witte kwikstaart’ Motacilla alba/yarrellii, adult, Nijkerk, Gelderland, Netherlands, 15 April 2006 (Peter van der Wijst). Same bird as in plate 335. Note grey rump. Pattern of t5 = A.
adult but looked more like a first-summer to us, like most of the females with little black. Quite a few of these birds (13%) had rather plain grey mantle/scapulars (amount of black <5%; see plate 328 for an example). The darkest females had 6080% black on the upperparts. Again, we do not know if their sex labels are correct. The palest males were two dissected, first-summer birds with 40% black. While it is quite normal to see (especially) male alba in which the black lower nape reaches onto the upper mantle (covering up to 10%), a few birds with black spots scattered across the mantle and scapulars were still a surprise to us. An example is shown in plate 330. In addition, 240
three birds showed more than 10% of black on the upperparts: one male western alba with 15%, another male western alba with 30%, and the eastern alba shown in plate 327 with 40%. Surprisingly, a few ‘dukhunensis’ skins from Iran (not included in our sample for statistical analysis) also showed a large amount (c 40%) of black on mantle (see plate 329 for an example). We do not really know what such birds are; they were collected far outside the normal range of yarrellii. They might be the result of interbreeding between alba and another taxon; in Asia, interbreeding has been recorded with personata, ocularis and baicalensis (Alström et al 2003). However,