I first visited Fair Isle in 1986 as a seventeen-year-old, benefitting from a Richard Richardson bursary to cover the accommodation costs at the bird observatory. As an inexperienced inland birder, it was fantastic to see Yellow-browed Warblers, Red-backed Shrikes and Short-toed Larks in real life, not just on the page of a field guide or a bird report. Thirty-nine years later, with a new bird observatory just completed and with a handful of autumn trips to Shetland under my belt, the time felt right to return to the “Magic Island”. With my usual travelling companion Andy Last wanting a change from birding Shetland this autumn, I spoke to Ben Sheldon, who not having visited Shetland before, was immediately keen. We booked to visit Fair Isle from September 24th to October 2nd, staying at the new observatory.
The Observatory garden has decent amounts of cover and contained the most confiding Barred Warbler that we have ever seen for the first three days of our stay:
One of the novelties of Fair Isle is the Fulmars that that sweep down the roads of the island and rise on updrafts of air from the dry-stone walls of the island:
We joined the pre-breakfast trap round each day. This superb adult male Red-backed Shrike was caught at dawn on Saturday 27th September, and was the first indication that a fresh wave of birds had made landfall on the island.
A Water Rail was another unexpected find in the Gully trap one morning, giving Ben the opportunity to ring this bird on Fair Isle:
Seeking Still Air
So much of birding is determined by the movements of air. Winds both propel and displace migrating birds. Whilst inherited genetic mechanisms may determine the direction and length of a bird’s migration, moving air, clouds and rain can also affect the route taken and are often the final factor in grounding birds, especially on coastal and island locations.
But whilst moving air is a huge influence on bird migration, we reflected that birders seeking out rare birds need to look for the opposite: they need to find still air. Still air is where the migrant birds are, once they have been delivered by moving air.
On Fair Isle, our days began by trying to guess where recently arrived birds might be found. The weather on our trip was dominated by blue skies and south-easterly winds for the first half of our stay, becoming strong southerly winds with rain and cloud later. We observed that later in the week the gardens and crofts at the south end of the island, usually such a reliable area for holding migrant birds, were being battered by the southerly winds and were often less productive.
Still air trumps habitat
In southerly winds, we tried heading north, to search the ravines and geos of the sheltered coast, where birds could be seen trying to find insects on the huge sea cliffs of Fair Isle. This would often involve sitting on cliff edges and looking down. A long way down:
These cliffs are not the natural habitat of Goldcrests, Yellow-browed Warblers or Redstarts. But there the air was still. On windy days, anywhere that held still air became a potential migrant bird trap. On exposed Fair Isle, even ditches offer some respite from the wind and may hold birds. This was memorably summed up by Oxfordshire’s very own Luke Marriner, now in his second season as an Assistant Warden on Fair Isle, who looked at the wind speed forecasts and said “if there is a good bird today, it’ll be in a ditch”.
We realised that to find birds here we had to put aside our assumptions about the habitat preferences of migratory birds, or simply checking bushes just because they were there, but instead see the island in terms of moving air and still air, and seek out the still air.
Migrant birds seeking the shelter of cliffs brings them into contact with some of the more usual residents of Fair Isle’s seacliffs. The recording below captures calling Goldcrests and Fulmars, an unlikely species combination in most parts of the world (volume up!):
Down the rabbit hole
Luke Marriner also provided the most memorable phone message of the week. Ben and I were walking the ditches of Suka Mire in central Fair Isle, when Luke’s message arrived “There is a Corncrake in a rabbit hole at North Light!” Luke had flushed the bird from virtually underfoot during his census walk around the lighthouse and it had flown before running into a rabbit hole at the top of the cliffs at Lericum. We walked up and over Ward Hill, then down past Easter Lother Water to see if we could see it. After a little searching, Ben looked down at a different rabbit hole, only to see the Corncrake staring back at him, almost within touching distance. It shot out of the hole and flew out over the sea, to land half-way up the enormous sea cliffs here, a surreal location for a crake. Migratory birds have to adapt to the environments they find themselves in. Anywhere with shelter from the wind offers some form of safety.
Migrants
Strong southerly and south-easterly winds are not great for goose and swan migration, but a few Barnacle, Greylag and Pink-Feet made it to the island during our stay. These migrating Barnacle Geese looked and sounded fantastic:
The croft gardens of Lower Stoneybrek, Stackhoull, Vaila’s Trees, Schoolton and Quoy were our most productive sites in the south of the island. I was admiring this Common Rosefinch at Schoolton…
… when a Bluethroat flew in and gave astounding views as it hopped around the garden:
This female Hawfinch was seen most days, briefly appearing at Schoolton, but we also had good looks at Burkle:
We found a freshly arrived Barred Warbler at Vaila’s Trees (“trees” is a relative term on Shetland, think a few dwarf pines and shrubs in a small walled garden, with nothing over 1.5 metres tall) that popped up in front of me and starred me down with those intense eyes, before lumbering off back into cover.
In island terms, the rarest bird that we saw during our stay was Fair Isle’s fifth-ever Glossy Ibis. Part of large influx of birds into the UK, this bird continued northwards and was seen on Mainland Shetland later the same day. Where next?
Later in the week, the weather deteriorated, bringing southerly gales, cloud and rain. We did a spot of seawatching during one storm with fellow guests Phil Woollen and Jason, and picked out a couple of Sooty Shearwaters and Red-throated Divers fighting their way south.
“Schreep” behind the sheep
The weather was now playing havoc with our travel plans. On 2nd October we were due to fly back to Mainland Shetland, but low cloud hanging over Tingwall airfield meant that the small inter-island plane never left Mainland. We would be stuck on Fair Isle for at least another day, and with the super intense low of Storm Amy moving huge amounts of air as she approached from the west, our concern was that we would be stuck on the island for days. I was trying to rearrange our travel plans by phone when I flushed a large pipit that gave a loud “schreep” call. It flew a short distance and landed in the grass behind a nearby sheep. I called to Ben, “Richard’s Pipit behind the sheep!” and we enjoyed decent views of the bird feeding in the grass, just west of Shirva:
Dipping Dunnock
Ben is a very sharp birder. So much so, that he had managed to glimpse three species during our trip that I had yet to see as we entered our final planned day on the island: Peregrine, Blackbird and Dunnock. During the day, I pulled back Blackbird, as a few new birds arrived on the island. As dusk began to fall, we were passing Chalet on our way back to the Observatory, when a small dark passerine dived into the cover of the bushes in the garden. Panic stations, it was a possible Dunnock!
Keen to level up our trip lists, I took a step along the path through the garden and immediately flushed a pipit that called with a high-pitched call and then dived straight back into the shrubbery of the garden a few meters away. Ben and I looked at each other, we both instantly knew that this was a good bird. The call was not quite right for Tree Pipit and neither was its behaviour. The challenge was that this was a very difficult bird to see. In the remaining light, we only had four flight views, which produced no photos, and heard two flight calls, neither of which I managed to record due to wind noise. We returned to the Observatory with mere news of a “mystery pipit” at Chalet. Privately, our hunch was that this bird was not behaving like any Tree Pipit that we had ever encountered and the call sounded good for Olive-backed Pipit, but we had no recording.
With the weather clearing the next morning, we only had an hour before the plane was due to take us back to Mainland and it was a twenty minute walk each way to Chalet. Time was against us. But as we walked quickly down the main road towards Chalet, the mystery pipit rose from the sheltered side of the house and called again, before diving back into cover. The bird was still here, was still very elusive, but in better light did perch very briefly on the road allowing a few poor photos to be taken. I also managed to record a single flight call, whilst sheltering in the still air provided by the garden bushes. Sadly, there was no further sign of the Dunnock.
There was no time to process our pictures, we were on the plane back to Mainland Shetland within the hour, but our back of camera previews revealed a pipit with a smooth unstreaked mantle and a head pattern that looked good for Olive-backed Pipit. The bird’s identity was completely resolved an hour later when Fair Isle warden Alex Penn managed to get a decent picture of the pipit, which confirmed that it was indeed a fine Olive-backed Pipit. We would take that! The Olive-backed Pipit remained on the island for that day, but remained very elusive, hardly showing for more than a few moments at any one time. By this date, this was only the second Olive-backed Pipit seen in the UK this autumn, despite many birds being recorded in Scandinavia this year:
Despite the fact that I still needed Dunnock, we left Fair Isle feeling satisfied. It is a beautiful island with spectacular coastal scenery. We had covered over 160km/100 miles on foot in eight days and found a nice selection of scarce migrants, including Barred Warbler, Richard’s Pipit and Olive-backed Pipit. We totalled 108 species between the two of us, making it the most productive of the six autumn trips to Shetland that I have made, and we were on a single island for most of the trip. Only one thing was missing. A monster Shetland rarity.
From geos to geokichla
Now we were a full 24 hours behind our scheduled return. We had a rather bumpy plane journey back to Mainland, but Storm Amy was about to interfere further. Flights back to the Scottish mainland were being cancelled rapidly. We resigned ourselves to spending one, possibly two, nights on Mainland Shetland sitting out the worst of the storm, before travelling back on Sunday (a whole three days late) when the winds were due to reduce in intensity. Storm Amy was predicted to hit Mainland Shetland at 5pm on Friday, when the winds would pick up to 105kph/65mph and the first bands of intense rain would arrive. We had about three hours of possible birding time. It was Siberian Thrush time.
To date, the standout rarity of this autumn was the arrival of a first-winter male Siberian Thrush on Mainland. This is one of the ultimate Shetland rarities, a stunning bird, full of plumage features, as well as being supremely rare (about 12 previous UK records) and very, very elusive. The bird’s Latin name of geokichla sibirica literally translates as “Siberian ground thrush” but this bird had taken to feeding on elder berries in a small patch of trees by Loch Asta in central Mainland. This Siberian Thrush was typically good at hiding itself in the deepest clumps of leaves when it came up to the canopy to feed. With patience, glimpses of small parts of the bird could be made out, a blue wing here, a tail there, if you were lucky a glimpse of an eye or the head pattern. Some of our best views were had by standing in the loch:
After two hours and no more than a few glimpses, I had nearly given up hope of getting a satisfying view of the Siberian Thrush. The skies were darkening, the wind was picking up, Storm Amy was nearly upon us. Then, like a dark shadow slipping away, an all-dark thrush flew low out of the back of the trees and crossed the road into the garden of the house by the loch. Optimistically, we peered over the wall of the garden, dreaming of seeing this mythical thrush feeding out in the open. And suddenly there it was. At first, it was feeding behind a plant pot, partially hidden. And then, casual as a Blackbird, it simply hopped out into an open area beneath the trees in the garden:
The blue! The head pattern!! The undertail coverts!!! We drank in dream views of the Siberian Thrush for perhaps 60 seconds, before it hopped away, out of sight again. Sometimes one minute can seem like eternity. And then the elation hit.
We ended the night staying at the Sumburgh Hotel, celebrating seeing one of the best birds, which provided an epic finale to a great trip, even if we were three days late getting home.
Our entire trip list, with all species recorded, photos and sound recordings, can be seen here.