In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. And God said, “Let there be birds,” and there were birds. But only the few would see them. And to do this, they had to pay the price.
The Birding Gods are fickle beasts. They give with one hand and take with the other. Having been deprived of a trip to worship the birds of Uganda with Dave Lowe and Ian Reid by a serious bike accident in June, I reasoned I had suffered enough. The Gods thought otherwise. I spent the summer recovering, walking, then cycling again. A planned trip to spend a week on Unst with Andy Last had looked in jeopardy, but I worked hard on my recovery and by late September, felt physically capable enough to commit to travel. This year, we would not base ourselves on Mainland Shetland, but rather headed north, to spend the week on Unst, home of the most northerly house, post office and lighthouse in the UK. We would be closer to the Gods. We would concentrate on finding our own birds. The Birding Gods would be pleased.
We left Oxford at 6am on Monday 26th September. A day I’ll always remember. Cause that was the day my belief in the benevolence of the Birding Gods died. By lunchtime, we were just south of Glasgow. We pulled into a service station. I glimpsed a thumbnail of a picture message from Jason arrive on my phone. I said to Andy “I think there’s a Nightjar in Oxfordshire“. Then, immediately, this:
The shock that rippled through the Oxfordshire birding community also rippled through us, in Scotland. But, unlike the other seventy people on that group whose lives at that very point in time had been thrown into chaos and who were desperately planning how they could escape work, family, or indeed any other sort of commitment at all, we were very calm. We were calm because we immediately knew we would not see this bird. It was six hours back to Oxford and we had a ferry to catch to Shetland that evening from Aberdeen. There was no decision to make. HAD I NOT SUFFERED ENOUGH? Obviously not, it was quite simply the best bird ever to turn up in Oxfordshire. A North American nightjar: better than the Oriole. Better than the Scops Owl. Better than the Surf Scoter. Much better than the Buff-bellied Pipit. It did not take long for our calm to turn into pain. We drove on. We suffered. We were well past Stirling before we spoke again. Andy turned to me and said, “Is it still there?” I checked and nodded, “Showing beautifully in the sunshine“. We birded the Girdleness peninsular, next to the Aberdeen ferry terminal, and found a Little Gull. At precisely the moment the Nighthawk took off from its fence in Wantage to continue its migration, our ferry pulled away from the docks in Aberdeen, into the teeth of a fierce north-westerly gale. It was going to be a rough night. Clearly, I had not suffered enough.
The next morning, our arrival in Lerwick was delayed by a couple of hours by the headwinds, so we had the chance to look for seabirds from the ship as dawn broke. In amongst the Fulmars, Gannets and occasional Bonxie, we found 5 Sooty Shearwaters shearing their way south through the North Sea. We docked in Lerwick, caught up with the Glaucous Gull in the harbour and the drake Surf Scoter at nearby Gulberwick, before we headed north to our home for the week, the most northerly island of Unst.
We were based for the week in Uyeasound, right by the harbour and right by the Otters. We checked the local area every morning for migrants, before birding north through the island.
Shetland in autumn is the land of Yellow-browed Warbler. They were out in force again this year, after a quiet year last year:
Some birds were quite vocal and we heard calling birds most days:
Most places had Common Redpolls too, calling fly-over birds were frequent:
But one of the highlights of this autumn was the influx of the big beasts from the north, Hornemann’s Arctic Redpolls. The birding machine that is Geoff Wyatt, found one just outside Uyeasound one afternoon when Andy and I were up in the north of the island, which we caught up with later in the week. We slipped off the island once, just to Mid Yell about 30 minutes away, to marvel at this fabulous white beast, before vowing that we must find our own:
At the ferry port this Minke Whale surfaced close by, the sound of its blow ringing around the bay, drawing attention:
Common migrants were a little thin on the ground, but sites with cover usually held something. We found Redstarts, Lesser Whitethroats and a Garden Warbler in various places, plus…
Occasionally we popped in to pay homage to a local scarcity:
We enjoyed an hour at Burrafirth, pictured above, one afternoon, with fog and clouds rolling in from Hermaness. We both thought we heard a Yellow-browed Warbler call from the bracken on the hillside. A quick clamber up revealed there was one, and a Willow Warbler and in the valley a Whinchat. Hermaness had no migrants, but still had good numbers of Great Skuas, we had 12 together at one point.
But we sensed something had to change. We were finding birds, but just not the right ones. Andy’s camera stopped working after four days. I took this as a good sign. Is there a better way to get a close, beautifully lit view of a good bird, than not to have a working camera at hand? We couldn’t think of one. Another day passed. We considered whether we should take this strategy a step further and submerge all our optics in the Pool of Sacred Tears (aka the small garden pool by the road out of Uyesound):
This thought process paid immediate dividends, with Andy getting a glimpse of a small dark crake running between the willow bushes in the background. It was nearly dark before it ran back, confirming its identity as a Water Rail. We flushed this bird from near this area as we walked back along the road the following morning too.
We went back to the Gods for advice. Andy re-created the moment that the mighty sea-birder Erik the Red scored the first Fea’s Petrel for the North Sea in AD65, from this longship near Haroldswick. But the Gods were not amused. I slipped on the deck of this boat and twisted my injured leg. Had we suffered enough? Had we paid the price? Would we get our reward? Find out next time in “Shetland 22: the end”.
🙂 Eagerly anticipating the next episode