Not Another Blogging Birder: Eastern Black-eared Wheatears

'Eastern' Black-eared Wheatear, Lesvos, April 2014 ( Copyright T D Wright )

The recent brief appearance in Hampshire of a dark-throated melanoleuca B.E.W. has provoked me to post these old phonescoped shots, plus some new DSLR shots below. The above bird is a pale-throated variant of the same 'race' that the Acres Down bird belonged to. Even in April, this bird shows very little brown tinge to its crown and mantle, and I saw many Spring birds which looked extremely black-and-white on Lesvos. Some authors state that melanoleuca can still have quite a lot of ochrous-brown in April, which wears off by June ( presumably feather-abrasion rather than loss of pigment ? ) to reveal a much whiter-looking bird. Therefore, I thought at first on Lesvos that these browner birds were all 'Easterns' in Spring...

'Eastern' Black-eared Wheatear, Lesvos, April 2015 ( Copyright T D Wright )

However, in Steve Dudley's A Birdwatching Guide To Lesvos it says that both hispanica & melanoleuca occur there, with pale and dark-throated forms of both. This surprised me, as in my old Lars Jonsson it says that Oenanthe hispanica hispanica occurs in Iberia and Northern Italy, and that from S. Italy eastwards it's Oenanthe hispanica melanoleuca. I wondered if this was out-of-date info. so I checked my 2010 Second Edition of the Collins and it said the same. So, are these hispanicas on Lesvos passage birds which have travelled North from sub-Saharan Africa to then head West to their breeding grounds? A dog-leggy type of migration? I need to look that up...

Black-eared Wheatear, Lesvos, April 2015 ( Copyright T D Wright )

I'm now not sure if this is an Eastern or Western, I believe Eastern has more black on the face in both 'morphs', but I still wouldn't like to say this is definitely melanoleuca, as even in bright sunlight it clearly has a great deal of brown on its crown, nape, mantle and breast.Also, the black doesn't extend above the bill-base or eye which suggests hispanica. Illustrations vary in different texts, so is there a 'key' to clinching this, or are there intermediate individuals? Apparently melanoleuca has a longer primary projection but I'm not sure if this bird is conclusive in that respect. I favour hispanica now. Comments welcome!