Southern Oceans 3: “There’s no way that’s a f*****g Wanderer!”

Having had one of the least productive birding days of our lives yesterday, we awoke on Sunday 26th January for our third day on the ship. We were just over half way to Marion Island at dawn, but within twenty-four hours would be within 20km of the Prince Edward Islands, the closest that we would be allowed to approach. Overnight we had transitioned into much cooler waters. The air temperature had also dropped, fleeces and jackets replacing the t-shirts of yesterday. Immediately there were birds!

Our first Black-bellied Storm Petrels danced low over the water, and our first Soft-plumaged Petrels sheared past.

Chunky White-chinned Petrels rapidly replaced Great-winged Petrels as the default all-dark seabird accompanying the ship.

And finally there were albatrosses. Indian Yellow-nosed Albatross was the most frequent visitor, some being close enough to pick out the yellow stripe on top of the bill and the orange bill tip:

Fabulous all-dark Sooty Albatrosses began appearing too, though we would see many more of these birds over the next few days:

It was a special moment when our first great albatrosses of the Wandering Albatross complex appeared behind the ship. The local breeders on Marion Island are Snowy Albatrosses, Diomedea exulans. These birds are the largest Wandering-type albatrosses, with some birds having a 3.5m (11 foot) wingspan.  A close pass by one of these enormous birds, felt more like being passed by a small fixed-wing aircraft:

Andy and I stood on deck 14, the top deck, watching a huge Wandering-type albatross performing gentle loops over the sea behind the boat. Suddenly and surprisingly, world famous seabird author Peter Harrison was standing next to us. He said “Check out the albatross following the ship, because from the photographs that I’ve seen I don’t think it’s a Wandering”.

Peter Harrison, right, and Andy.

We knew that the only other realistic option was that the bird was a Tristan Albatross and that Peter Harrison has devoted much time to distinguishing these two species in the field. According to Harrison’s own work (Seabirds: the new identification guide, 2021) only male Tristan Albatrosses of a certain age can be separated from Snowy Albatrosses. These birds have uniformly dark wings, especially the forewing, with distinct white elbow patches in the mid-wing. Ideally there is little black in the tail too. According to Harrison, no Snowy Albatross shows this exact pattern on the wing and tail and these birds can safely be identified as Tristan Albatrosses.

My first reaction, unvoiced, was that it seemed remarkable coincidence that as soon as we starting seeing great albatrosses, a candidate Tristan Albatross should appear. We walked to the back of the ship with Peter, where he saw and photographed the albatross. He then exclaimed, memorably, “Excuse my language, but there’s no way that’s a f*****g Wanderer!” Peter Harrison was adamant that this bird was a Tristan Albatross and he found pictures of stage 6 Tristan Albatrosses in an A4 folder that he carried that looked very similar.

Over the next few days, we became aware that not everyone was convinced that these birds might be seperable. Indeed, both Peter Ryan (article here) and Hadoram Shirihai appear to doubt that these two species can be reliably separated in the field. We saw candidate Tristan Albatrosses on a number days when we were around Marion Island:

Putative Tristan Albatross

Some of the South African guides expressed the view that bearing in mind the identification difficulties, it just seemed more likely that these birds were Snowy Albatrosses from the local breeding colony on Marion, rather than Tristan Albatrosses, all the way from Tristan da Cunha in the central south Atlantic. We decided to let the experts debate this one and moved on.

As the day wore on and we sailed further south into even cooler waters, we began seeing another bird in the Little Shearwater complex, Subantarctic Shearwaters. These birds were the cold-water compatriot of the Tropical Shearwaters that we were seeing yesterday. The demarcation between where different seabird species were found seemed very precise and yet was completely invisible to human senses.

Subantarctic Shearwater

It had been an incredible day, our first real experience of the seabirds of the Southern Oceans. Our concerns about viewing seabirds from a large ship had been alleviated. There was no seasickness, despite some windy days. Deck 7, and both the bow and the stern, provided excellent viewing. The atmosphere on board was convivial, there was plenty of space for nearly 2,000 birders to spread out, even though deck 7 could get busy in peak periods. We were ready for Marion.

Next: we arrive at Marion Island and nearly loose our minds.

Southern Oceans 2: “Good Morning Flockers!”

Birdlife South Africa brand their pelagic trips as “Flocks”. First, they organised two trips into the deep waters off the southern coast of Africa, Flock to Sea (2013) and Flock to Sea Again (2017). Then in 2022 there was the original Flock to Marion and we were on Flock to Marion Again. There is even a club for those that have been on every Flock, the Four Flocks Sake club!

Each morning, there would be an announcement over the ship’s tannoy. In a thick South Africa accent, making sure that the pronunciation was just on the right side of obscenity, we would be greeted with the words “Good Morning Flockers!” This never failed to raise a smile and quickly became the standard greeting between Ian, Andy and myself.

Ian had come from Abu Dhabi, where he currently works, and had brought along Oscar Campbell (who recently co-authored the latest editon of the Birds of the Middle East), Andrew Ward and friends. It was also great to bump into Fabian Bindrich, a German birder, whom I last saw when I sat next to him for three successive afternoons in July 2019 on pelagic trips off the coast of Madeira. We have never met on land!

The rest of the 2,000 passengers were truly international. As expected, the majority were South African, but we were told that there were over 200 German birders and over 100 Swedes aboard. We also met many American and Dutch birders, but relatively few British. Ian may have been the only Australian on the ship.

Crossing The Tropical Desert

Me, desperately seeking seabirds

Today was our first full day at sea. The sun was hot, the sea and sky were blue. We were in warm tropical waters influenced by the Agulhas current, that brings warm water from the Indian Ocean sweeping down the east coast of Africa.

Despite all our enthusiasm and anticipation, over ten hours of seawatching produced only three bird species today: Great-winged Petrel were regular; first and last thing there were a few Cory’s Shearwaters and we saw a single Tropical Shearwater, one of the Little Shearwater complex:

Our first Tropical Shearwater

Between 10am and 5pm, my eBird checklists show that we only recorded one species, Great-winged Petrel.

Great-winged Petrel. One of 63 seen during day two.

We struggled to think of a time when so many hours of birding had only resulted in one species of bird being recorded. We agreed that this was probably the quietest day of birding, in terms of hours put in and reward, that any of us had ever done! We went to bed rather deflated, but hoping for more tomorrow as we approached cooler waters.

Next: Peter Harrison explodes.

Southern Oceans 1: “We’re going to need a bigger boat”

Marion Island is remote. One of the two Prince Edward Islands, Marion lies about half-way between South Africa and Antarctica. From Marion Island, it is just under 2000km north to the coast of South Africa and 2300km south to the coast of Antarctica. It is in the middle of the Southern Oceans and at 46 degrees south, is in the heart of the Roaring Forties.

These oceans are the wildest on the planet. Winds and waves circumnavigate the entire globe around Antarctica, unimpeded by major land masses. As such, some of the planet’s strongest winds and largest waves are recorded here. The winds blow consistently from the west, picking up speed as the latitude increases. In the Age of Sail, the winds at different latitudes became famous as the Roaring Forties, the Furious Fifties and the Screaming Sixties.

The constant westerly winds fuel the Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC), the world’s largest ocean current, which mixes warm waters descending south from the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific oceans with northward cold water from Antarctica. The convergence of these waters (the Subtropical Convergence Zone or SCZ) brings food from deep within the oceans up to the surface. The SCZ marks the boundary of some of the best seabirding on the planet and this was our destination:

This combination of abundant food, and rare dry land for nesting, makes the Prince Edward Islands a focus for millions of breeding seabirds in the southern hemisphere summer. Visiting such a location is very difficult and landing on the islands is forbidden.

I read about the first “Flock to Marion” trip in 2022. It was an incredible concept, a cruise ship filled with birders, heading out from South Africa and sailing south to Marion Island. The trip provided a rare opportunity to visit this remote part of the globe and to see some of the incredible seabird species that can be found there. Flock to Marion also functioned as a fund-raising opportunity to help the Mouse-free Marion Project, which aimed to eradicate seabird-eating mice from the islands. It also sounded like a completely mad adventure.

Then, in the summer of 2024, it was announced that there would be another trip, to raise further funds. “Flock to Marion Again” was due to depart in late January 2025. This time, I knew I had to be on that ship.

I spread the news that Flock to Marion Again was planned for January 2025, and Andy Last (from Oxford), Ian Reid (from Abu Dhabi) and I booked our places. Beforehand we admitted that we all had a number of concerns. None of us had ever been on a cruise ship before and none of us ever thought that we would. What would birding from a huge cruise ship be like? Would we be so high up that the smaller prions and storm petrels would be invisible? There was also the matter of being in a confined space with nearly 2,000 other birders for seven days. Would this be heaven or would this be hell?

But at the forefront of my mind was seasickness. As someone who barely survived seasickness on the Scillonian III pelagic in 2001, I had given up hope of seeing the southern seabirds. How could I ever sail across the roughest oceans on the planet and survive on deck long enough to see any birds? There was only one solution, a big boat. Or in the immortal words of Chief Brody in Jaws: “We’re going to need a bigger boat!” In fact, a really big boat. Fortunately, Flock to Marion Again had booked the cruise ship MSC Musica:

Weighing in at 92,409 tonnes, I hoped that she would provide a stable base to ward off my seasickness, even in the Roaring Forties. The trip was superbly organised. Beforehand there were online seabird and cetacean identification sessions, hosted by local experts. During the cruise some 60 guides were positioned around the ship’s viewing stations, between 5am and 5pm, to help with seabird identification. A daily lecture schedule was planned, including talks on seabirds from renowned experts Peter Ryan, Peter Harrison and Hadoram Shirihai, as well as lectures on the Mouse-free Marion Project and the conservation work being carried out on the island.

Now committed to the trip, I decided to fully engage with the experience. I attended the online identification sessions, I bought the t-shirt and even went to a penguin fancy dress party, hosted in one of the bars, the evening before we arrived at Marion. A proportion of the cost of cruise automatically went towards the fund-raising efforts.

We boarded the ship in Durban Harbour in the afternoon of Friday 24th January. Up close, the MSC Musica was enormous, towering over the dock infrastructure, a 15-storey high floating hotel. Our cabin was on deck 10, our balcony looking out over the port side. The lowest viewing deck for seeing seabirds was deck 7. Even here it still felt like we were a long, long way above the sea.

Durban harbour provided views of a hunting Peregrine, a flyover Osprey and 4 Pink-backed Pelicans thermalling above the ship. Feeding on the dockside grass were Cape Wagtails and Southern Grey-headed Sparrows. Flocks of Egyptian Geese flew around everywhere, perching on the towers and rooftops of the docks.

At 4:30pm we set sail, full of anticipation and excitement. Great Crested Terns flew past the ship and we saw our first Grey-hooded Gulls. We soon got up to our cruising speed of around 30kph. The ship turned south-east and began heading across the southern Indian Ocean, away from the African continent. An hour from the coast, our first pelagic species appeared, a distant Indian Yellow-nosed Albatross, followed by a Great-winged Petrel. Another hour produced another couple of Great-winged Petrels and 3 Cory’s Shearwater. The seabirds near the South African coast had not quite matched our expectations levels, but it was very early days.

Next: the toughest birding day of our lives in the Tropical Desert!

The Lye Valley area, 2024: rags to riches

January to July inclusive: a seven-month test of patience

2024 started quietly and for the first seven months, things continued in that vein. The only birds of note leading up to spring migration were a Water Rail on 10th January; the earliest singing Willow Warbler in the county on March 20th; quickly followed by the Lye Valley’s fourth record of Mute Swan on March 24th:

Spring migration saw a very brief Common Redstart and the second Common Grasshopper Warbler reeling away on the golf course. It is always a pleasure to hear these birds in the city:

But that was about it. Looking at the last four years of coverage, for the first two-thirds of 2024, it was the quietest year yet. Only when the summer “death zone” of mid-May to early August came to an end, did the dark blue line begin to pick itself up:

August to December: an astonishing autumn

But what an autumn it was and how the year turned around. 2024 saw me complete my 700th patch visit, achieved over a total period of six years. Adding new species becomes increasingly difficult the more one visits an area, so I was unprepared for what was about to occur. I noted that exactly one year and one day had passed since the last addition to the Lye Valley bird list, a superb Corn Bunting on 17th August 2023. Perhaps these gaps of over a year between new species were going to become normal now?

In fact, the autumn saw an astonishing sequence of bird records in the Lye Valley area from early August until early November. In this 12-week period no less than five new species were added to the Lye Valley list, plus I somehow managed to pull back the only species on the Lye Valley list that I have not seen. Virtually a new species every other week, for several months. It was insane! Inevitably, it started with duck.

Records of flyover duck species that are not Mallard are extremely rare. The lack of any open water doesn’t help. In the last six years, there is a single nocturnal record of Eurasian Wigeon, a single record of Eurasian Teal in a spell of freezing weather and two records of flyover Goosander in winter. So when a small, compact duck appeared flying low and fast over Warneford Meadon on August 18th, the last thing I was expecting was a Common Pochard, the 108th species recorded here:

Incredibly, the 18th August produced not one, but two new species for the Lye Valley area. Forty minutes after the Pochard flyover, a movement on the roof of the Churchill Hospital alerted me to a stonking Northern Wheatear. This was one of the first autumn records of this species in the county, and was a long-anticipated addition to the Lye Valley area bird list, although the location of this bird was completely unanticipated! Species numnber #109:

Another species of chat that I thought would turn up eventually was discovered on 25th September. After 684 patch visits, a female-type European Stonechat finally appeared in Churchill Meadow, feeding in the rain, a few hundred meters south of where the Northern Wheatear was a few weeks previously. Species #110:

The 5th October 2024 will live long in the memory. The second-ever record of Marsh Tit, was a great start. Just like the first bird, it was very mobile, passing through scrub on the golf course:

Whilst walking back around the edge of the hospital, I then stumbled across patch gold, a superb Yellow-browed Warbler, feeding in willows between Warneford Meadow and the hospital:

Yellow-browed Warbler, species #111 and probably the best patch moment that I’ve had!

The Yellow-browed Warbler remained for week, and was even seen by a number of other birders. It is the rarest bird that I’ve found in the Lye Valley area, being the 26th Yellow-browed Warbler found in Oxfordshire, in what was a very good autumn for this species across the country.

Another species that also moved through the UK in much higher numbers than usual was Hawfinch. The last big Hawfinch year was 2017/8 when birds were even found in the Lye Valley woods, although this was just before I began covering the area. Being such an uncommon and secretive bird in Oxfordshire, I had given up all hope of seeing this species on my patch. However, with Hawfinches being widely reported across southern England throughout October, I began mounting daily dawn vigils, with the hope of seeing or hearing a flyover bird. My wish came true on 30th October, when 2 Hawfinches flashed over Warneford Meadow, calling:

Whilst flyover Hawfinches are one thing, to find a Hawfinch perched up on my patch was entirely another. A week later, a scan through a feeding thrush flock was brought to an abrupt halt by the distinctive shape of a Hawfinch, feeding on rowan berries, a superb Oxford city record. I had entered the realms of fantasy!

The next addition to the Lye Valley area bird list was slightly less shock-inducing. A flyover Great Black-backed Gull has long been on my radar, even though this species is relatively sedentary in the county. On November 2nd this bird became the 112th species recorded in this area of urban Oxford:

But the year was not over yet. A tip-off from a dog walker revealed only the second-ever Western Barn Owl hunting over Warneford Meadow, captured here on my phone video:

There was a brief Woodcock on November 9th, this species is just about annual here in November. That Woodcock became the 82nd species recorded in the Lye Valley area in 2024, making it the second-best year in terms of species recorded, after the record-breaking year of 2023, with 87 species. This was quite some turnaround from the very quiet first half of the year. There was one final surprise in store. On December 11th, a series of distant honking sounds materialised into four fabulous Whooper Swans, that flew north-east over Headington and species number 83 for 2024:

The lesson here is “don’t give up”. Ride out the quiet periods, because if you know that your local patch attracts migrant birds, then there will always be something eventually. The astonishing autumn of 2024 produced Yellow-browed Warbler, two Hawfinch records, four Whooper Swans, Common Pochard, Woodcock, Western Barn Owl, European Stonechat, Northern Wheater and Marsh Tit, all within a tiny area of urban East Oxford. This autumn may never be beaten, in terms of quality species!

The full illustrated list of all 112 bird species recorded in the Lye Valley area can be found here. Now let’s see what 2025 has in store. Happy New Year all!

An Albatross for Christmas

This year’s bird-themed Christmas cake celebrates albatrosses. Having failed once again to persuade my wife of my first choice of cake (an Ivory Gull on a freshly killed seal, think red, think white!), the cake this year is inspired by the Mouse-free Marion Project. Funds are being raised to eradicate introduced mice from Marion Island, which have developed a taste for seabird chicks, which they eat alive. This predation is seriously impacting the populations of the many albatross and petrel species that breed on this sub-Antarctic island.

The cake was made using a Nigel Slater recipe and the albatross skimming over the top of the cake was made from modelling clay and then painted with acrylics. The albatross is a Tristan Albatross, based on the bird on the front cover of the second edition of Peter Harrison’s “Seabirds”. This mature male plumage is one of the few that can be distinguished in the field from the more numerous Snowy Albatrosses, which breed on Marion Island. I’m no artist, but I think it is identifiable!

Happy Christmas to all and let’s all try to avoid being eaten alive by mice!

Oxford City Whoopers

When a Whooper Swan flew over my head on Warneford Meadow, Oxford on 12th November 2022, I wrote it off as a freakish one-off, an incredible record, never to be repeated. What right does a small urban, inland patch, with no standing water, have to record Whooper Swan? Whoopers are pretty rare in Oxfordshire, with a small number of records in winter.

Then, on Wednesday morning, the unthinkable happened. I had just left Warneford Meadow and was crossing the golf course, when I heard what appeared to be a distant honking call. I stopped in my tracks. My first instinct was that it may have been a calling goose. This was good news. We don’t get many waterbirds up here, I haven’t recorded Greylay Goose in over 18 months and there has only been one record of Canada Goose this year. I stared at the line of pine trees on the horizon, from where the sound originated.

Then I heard more calls. Simultaneously, as the thought “Whooper Swans?” formed in my mind, my jaw began to drop. Seconds later, four huge, gleaming white swans broke the skyline, their calls echoing over the golf course. It was true, I was in the presence of Whoopers:

The ten seconds that it took the 4 Whooper Swans to fly over my patch, over the Churchill Hospital and away over Headington, were blissful. I took pictures and even made a late effort to record their calls, unsuccessfully unfortunately, as I had prioritised getting some photographs. With only four records of Mute Swan here in six years, there are now two records of Whooper Swan, making Mute Swan only twice as likely as Whooper Swan here! My overriding memory though, will be the sounds of wild swan calls, ringing out over my patch, just magical.

Warneford Meadow Barn Owl

“Excuse me, are you looking at birds?“

This is a familiar and well-used introduction, usually from a non-birder to a birder. It is slightly preferable to “What are you looking at?” Often folk are just curious as to why someone might be standing in a meadow, binoculars around their neck, looking up at the sky with a microphone next to them. It’s a fair question. However, explaining the intricacies of recording visible migration is often beyond the limits of my patience, so I usually just say “yes“.

On this occasion, the person making inquiries wanted some help identifying a bird that they had seen. My heart sank a little. This might not be a quick interaction and more importantly, our conversation might drown out the flight calls of Hawfinches passing overhead. Then suddenly I became much more interested:

“It was a large white bird, bigger than a Kestrel, floating low over the meadow in the very last of the light, occasionally dropping down, then rising up again“

It was a perfect description of a Barn Owl hunting. Barn Owls are very rare up here. Isaac West and I sounded recorded one calling when we were out listening for Common Scoters in the spring of 2021. We never saw that bird and it has remained the sole Lye Valley area record over the last six years. I was intrigued by the dog-walker’s report, even though the bird was only seen once, and that was several days ago.

On Thursday evening, I visited Warneford Meadow as the light was fading. By 5pm it was dark and I was just about to return, when a ghostly pale shape floated across the meadow in front of me: Barn Owl! I took some video of the owl hunting, the lights of the Churchill Hospital bright in the background:

I watched the Barn Owl hunting for about 20 very special minutes, amazed that it had found this small area of meadow in urban Oxford, completely surrounded by housing and hospitals.

This was my 700th visit to the Lye Valley area, and Barn Owl is the 81st species that I have recorded here this year. The illustrated list of all 112 species recorded in the Lye Valley area is here.

The Hawfinch irruption delivers again!

With overhead migration calming down (in fact grinding to halt, there was none this morning) it feels as if we are moving into winter proper. The solid grey skies of the last week, and the terrible news from the American election results today, added to the slightly flat feel. But there were thrushes. Fieldfares are regular winter visitors to urban Oxford, but are nearly always seen, and heard, flying over. On a couple of occasions in the last six years, Fieldfares have come down to feed on berry trees, but believe it or not, this is the first time that I’ve seen one on the ground here:

I was quite pleased and assumed that this was probably going to be the highlight from today’s patch visit. The Fieldfares had joined about 15 Redwings that were feeding in rowan trees on the golf course. Their presence was driving the local Mistle Thrushes into a fury, their alarm calls were angrily ringing all around. I scanned through the trees, counting thrush numbers until I was brought to a halt by the rear end of a bird, perched at the back of the tree. The short tail, the long white wing-bar, framed by dark primaries below it and an evenly brown back above it, could only mean one thing: there was a Hawfinch in the tree in front of me. In Oxford city!

Having recorded a pair of flyover Hawfinch last week, I was on the alert for further flyovers, but had not dreamt that I would find a feeding bird, perched up on my patch. This was a fantastic moment!

Trying not to move in case I disturbed it, yet wanting a slightly better view, I shuffled a little to my left. This gave me decent binocular views of most of the bird, including the massive bill, orange head and black eye mask. The light was terrible, which meant that the photos were too, but the key features can be seen:

The Hawfinch fed for a few more seconds, doing it’s best Waxwing impression by appearing to take rowan berries from the tree:

And then, typically for this species, it simply disappeared into thin air. I scanned through the tree numerous times and eventually circled the tree, but saw or heard no further sign of this fabulous species. How many more Hawfinches are out there? Will there be more?! At the moment, it feels like the sky is the limit as to what may turn up next, expectation levels are dangerously high!

The irruption delivers: a local patch Hawfinch – at last!

No-one was more ready for a Hawfinch flyover than me. I had refreshed my search image of flying birds and I had listened to recordings of flight calls on a daily basis.

Search image: chunky, short-tailed, big-headed, with a huge translucent wingbar (picture from the last big irruption, winter 2017/18).

I had also refined my flight call sound recording technique, positioning my recorder with the microphone pointing straight up, a meter or so from where I stood, watching the sky. This enabled me to review interesting flight calls and capture the important ones. And still they nearly got past me.

I had been out watching and listening to bird migration for the first hour of light pretty much every day for the last week. Reports of Hawfinches passing over local sites kept me motivated, but after a combined total of about eight hours of watching I was beginning to wonder if any were ever going fly over this small, green patch of urban Oxford.

At 7:15am on Tuesday 30th October, after about half an hour of watching and listening to light overhead bird migration, I heard a series of sharp, high-pitched flight calls, from above and almost behind me. They sounded a bit like a Meadow Pipit calling whilst 1,000 volts were being passed through it. Or more accurately, a repeated high-pitched “tsick“.

I whirled around and just got onto the source of the calls: two large, short-tailed finches that flew low and fast away from me, disappearing over the trees on Hill Top Road, to the west. No real plumage details could be made out but all my instincts were that those birds were probably Hawfinches. Now it was down to the sound recorder to confirm the identification.

Fortunately, my recorder had picked up the flight calls, even over the sounds of a local dog walker passing by and the banging of building work at the Warneford Hospital site. The calls are classic Hawfinch flight calls, an inverted v-shaped call at the 7-9 kHz range. Typical Hawfinch, completely distinctive, yet somehow easy to overlook.

The last big Hawfinch year, the winter of 2017/18, was just before I began regularly watching the Lye Valley area. Phil Barnett found a small flock of Hawfinches in the Lye Valley woods in February 2018. I wondered how it would ever be possible to see this elusive species here again? Fortunately, this year’s irruption of Hawfinches from continental Europe has provided just that opportunity. Species number 111 for the Lye Valley bird list and for me!

Shetland 24: northern lights and eastern gems

A quieter week on Shetland this year, dominated by cold north-westerly winds and regular rain. Andy Last and I based ourselves at Wethersta on Mainland, having stayed on Unst for the last couple of years, and went slightly later in the year, arriving on 8th October, to mix things up a bit.

In terms of species seen it was a rather front-loaded week, with some good birds in the first few days. In the second half of our stay, the winds swung around to the south-west and we hardly saw a migrant bird. It was quite tough going. Our total of 83 species on Shetland in a week is our lowest by some distance and reflects the lack of common migrants. What was more surprising was the lack of birders that we encountered. It was nice to bump into Roger Wyatt, Jim Hutchins and Ewan Urquhart at various points, but on a daily basis we hardly saw anyone all week!

Warbler Wonderland

The main focus of our efforts was finding migrant landbirds. We spent time, much time, looking at trees. Some we seemed to get to know on an individual basis.

Andy, communing with the trees at Kergord

Siberian Chiffchaff by Andy

There were a few Barred Warblers about. This bird was at Cullivoe on Yell:

The huge dump of Yellow-browed Warblers that occurred in late-September had mostly moved through by the time that we arrived. This Yellow-browed Warbler was at Valyie on Unst:

Yellow-browed Warblers often provide the sound of Shetland in autumn. This calling bird was at Kergord:

There was a nice selection of phylloscopus warblers present. This Arctic Warbler was in the Burn of Njugalswater, near Lerwick:

This Greenish Warbler was in the sycamores behind the house at Valyie on Unst:

It was great to hear the Greenish Warbler calling:

But the best of all the phylloscopus warblers, and in my mind one of the best birds of all, was the Pallas’s Warbler at Swining. Feeding low down, and calling occasionally, this bird displayed all of its fabulous features: the crown stripe and bright yellow supercillia, the double wing bars and the lemon-yellow rump. All packed into a tiny green and white phylloscopus gem:

Show me the stripes!

When you see a Pallas’s Warbler this well, you know that you’ve had a good autumn:

Not all of the warblers that we saw were green, white and stripey. I was scanning through the crop field at Valyie on Unst, when an unstreaked acrocephalus warbler began bounding through the crop towards me. Having spent a full eight hours trying to pin down the identification of what turned out to be a very elusive Blyth’s Reed Warbler in the very same field in 2022, it felt like history was repeating itself in front of me. However, this bird had a blindingly white throat, a dark crown, a short bill and a long primary projection: it was the Paddyfield Warbler that was last reported three days previously:

Paddyfield Warbler by Andy

In statistical terms, the rarest warbler that we saw was the candidate Central Asian Lesser Whitethroat, halimodendri, at Hunter’s Wood on Unst. We had the pleasure of bumping into Dave Cooper here, who played us his recording of the remarkable tit-like call of this bird.

Shetland is surrounded by sea and we did not entirely neglect the ocean. Below, sea-watching from Eshaness in a freezing sub-zero north-westerly. A constant stream of some 400 Northern Fulmars passed north, 3 Sooty Shearwaters were the highlight:

The sea and me.

This adult Great Northern Diver was in the bay at Scousborough. It is moulting out of summer plumage. The bill is also in a transitional state between the black of summer and the grey of winter:

No visit to Shetland would be complete without a picture of a distant vagrant seaduck. This year’s “spot-the-bird” picture involves many Common Eider and a single drake White-winged Scoter, all the way from north-western North America:

“Dude, the whole sky is red and green!”

The phenomenon that will live the longest in the memory, was the aurora borealis on Thursday 10th October. Aware that solar activity was peaking, Andy stepped outside just before 8pm and walked into the remnants of a huge solar storm. As the charged particles from a Coronal Mass Ejection Event funneled into the earth’s magnetic field, they collided with oxygen atoms in the upper atmosphere, making them glow green and red.

Andy ran back into the house, shouting the immortal words “Dude, the whole sky is red and green!” I ran outside and nearly fell over. A incredible aurora was playing out above our heads. The colours were clear to the naked eye and intense. A huge red bridge spanned the sky from the northern horizon to the south. Either side of the red bridge, the sky was glowing green:

Aurora Borealis above our accommodation in Wethersta

We staggered around, mouths open. As we watched, the colours changed and moved, but red remained dominant:

The apex of the red bridge, directly above us, a vortex of swirling red

Having always assumed that the colours in photographs of the aurora were exaggerated by the camera, it was astounding to see such colours with the naked eye. It was a truly incredible experience and only ended when the sky clouded over, but will be remembered forever.

Our eBird trip report of everything that we saw on Shetland, plus some birding near Aberdeen on the way north, is here.

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