Scaup, Longton Brickcroft NR

This cracking juvenile female scaup has been at Longton Brickcroft Nature Reserve for about a week now. A really nice looking bird.

Yellow-legged gull, Pennington Flash

A smart looking adult yellow-legged gull was in the roost this week. This is a species which seems to have become less common at the flash in recent years, but so far this autumn there have been at least three different adults so perhaps things are picking up a bit.

It's the best time of year to see whooper swans at the flash and these two dropped in briefly this morning before heading off east.

Also this week, two each of great white and little egrets have reappeared after going missing during the period of high water levels following heavy rain last Wednesday.

Autumn rooks

Autumn brings with it many new sounds, especially the evocative calls of wildfowl as they arrive in numbers on our estuaries and marshes. Perhaps overlooked and under appreciated though is the call of rooks at a rookery at this time of year. On a beautiful sunny day such as this it brings great joy to my heart, and this is when they look at their best with their gorgeous glossy black plumage. In many respects rooks are the true sound of autumn, just as skylarks are the sound of spring!

Pennington Flash this weekend

Water levels are now very high following the torrential rain that brought the Slavonian grebes on Wednesday. Combined with the total lack of habitat management at the flash and high disturbance levels at weekends this results in virtually no shoreline available for ducks or waders. Yesterday, five pochard were new including four drakes, also two wigeon off what remains of the spit. The remnants of Ramsdales scrape held 20 teal and a female mandarin. Early on there was an Egyptian goose at the sailing club.

This morning I at last I caught up with the juvenile garganey which has been present but elusive since the week before I went to Barra. It wasn't particularly showy today, I occasionally got a glimpse as it moved through the vegetation on the flooded spit but most of the time it was out of view. 

Also today, three of yesterdays five pochard were still present and at least one immature wigeon on the spit, but best of all, my first returning goldeneye of the autumn/winter.

Slavonian grebes and four great white egrets, Pennington Flash

I arrived at Green Lane at 12:45 in heavy rain hoping that the weather might have dropped something in.  I scanned the western end through binoculars and almost immediately saw two small grebes directly out from the sailing club but close in to the ruck. On looking through the scope my immediate reaction was that they had Slavonian grebe jizz and were not black-necked. Unfortunately, the light was poor and rain was pouring so I was unable to confirm the identification from Green Lane, but I was so convinced that they were Slavonian that I decided to have a walk to the ruck in this awful weather in order to get a better look. 

My worst fears were confirmed on the ruck, it was a real mud bath, puddles and mud everywhere and the rain kept pouring. By now I was soaked with rain running down my back and my optics and glasses covered in rain drops and steaming up. Finally I relocated the grebes only to discover that they had moved to the opposite side! It was very dull and misty and I was really struggling to get anything on them. I tried a bit of video on my phone but it was difficult to even get it to respond because the screen was covered in water and the video was inconclusive.

After about 10 minutes the birds started to swim towards me and eventually stopped quite close to the ruck at a distance of about 15m, I couldn't believe my luck. It was still pouring with rain but I risked getting my camera out and quickly took a few photos.

The birds were about two thirds the size of a great crested grebe. They were dark grey and white. The heads of both birds peaked at the rear and the black crown was neat and didn’t smudge behind the eye. The bills were short and straight lacking the uptilt of black-necked, and they had a longish body which lacked the little grebe like rear end....and still the rain poured. It was time to go home and salvage what I could of my optics and get myself dry with a cup of tea!

So they were Slavonian grebes and it seems very likely that these were the same two that were at Acre Nook Quarry in Cheshire yesterday.

Phenomenal shearwater passage in the Sea of the Hebrides

To be honest I did have an inkling of what today might bring when I wrote yesterdays blog post! A birder on yesterdays crossing from Castlebay to Oban had reported 25 great shearwaters from the ferry between Tiree and Rum, so I was hopeful that we might also get to see a few of these wonderful ocean wanderers this morning. Perhaps we'd get lucky, even one bird would suffice, but as it transpired, today was one of the greatest experiences in my birding life. Nothing could have prepared me for this spectacle!

It was still dark when MV Isle of Lewis left Castlebay one hour early at 7am. For the first 30 minutes we sat in the viewing lounge and could see nothing through the windows except blackness, but then at about 7:40 in the half light we spotted a couple of auks and at least one shearwater. This immediately piqued our interest because as I joked to Ray, we'd already seen more than we had seen on the entire journey out two weeks ago! A slight exaggeration perhaps, but the fact is, this was the sixth time we had taken this route at this time of year and virtually all of the previous journeys had been disappointing with very few sea birds, so these few scraps so early into the voyage prompted us to go up on deck immediately.

As soon as we arrived on deck we spotted another couple of shearwaters. The first was definitely sooty but the other seemed to have a white belly but didn't look like Manx. A few minutes later another bird with a white belly, this time closer to the boat, and with the light now better we were able to tentatively identify it as a great shearwater. Then there was another even closer and this time we could see it's pale collar and dark cap, no doubt about this one, a definite great shearwater!

Ten minutes later and we'd lost count of great shearwaters! We watched in wonder as a flock of over 50 approached the rear of the boat and then overtook us, every one of them a great. And still they came, next a flock of 20 with a few sooties, and it was still only 8am, just three minutes after sunrise. Over the next 45 minutes we watched as hundreds of great shearwaters went past the boat plus many sooties, but only a handful of Manx. We also spotted at least three large shearwaters lacking the dark cap of greater, clearly Cory's shearwaters, although the pedantic may comment that they could have been the much rarer Scopoli's. 

The photo above is slightly cropped, in the original there are at least 121 great shearwaters.

The last day

It's been a tough two weeks on Barra, the least productive of the three years we have been coming here, and though yes we have seen some good birds, it's generally been slow gowing and very samey. Still there's always next year. 

Highlights today were white-tailed eagle, hen harrier and 200 barnacle geese passing through the Sound of Barra, but nothing new for the trip. Tomorrow the ferry leaves Castlebay before dawn so there'll be nothing new for the island, just whatever seabirds we might see on the crossing..... 

Ring Ouzel at Glen in 14819mph winds

This afternoon we found a cracking 1st winter male ring ouzel at Glen, initially flushed from a ditch at the side of the road. Glen is a good place for seeing this species when they pass through Barra, and last year we saw a male here. Also at Glen we had adult white-tailed and golden eagles overhead. Brambling at Northbay was another highlight, an island tick for us.

Greenland Redpoll at Creachan, Barra

This redpoll was at Creachan wood today. It was clearly a large bird, but unfortunately we had no other redpolls nearby for direct comparison. However, it has the three dark lines or "cats claws" on the flanks reaching all of the way down to the dark centred tertials and it immediately made me think Greenland redpoll Acanthis flammea rostrata. 

Unfortunately the redpolls are a bit of a quagmire so definite identification is difficult at the best of times and impossible in this case. To me this is clearly not a "British" lesser redpoll cabaret, it's far too big and heavily streaked for that, but there is the possibility that it could be the Icelandic race icelandica. This race is very similar to rostrata and the two are sometimes grouped as northwestern redpoll. However, rostrata is far more migratory than icelandica and most northwestern redpolls which come to the UK are considered to be rostrata for that reason. So I'll have to be content with calling this bird a northwestern redpoll, but in all likelihood it's a Greenland redpoll rostrata.

The cats claws are the three parallel dark lines that you can see on the birds flanks. Crucially they reach the undertail coverts.

A bit of star gazing

This evening the skies were clear so I went outside for an hour at 10pm. Here on Barra light pollution is at an absolute minimum and once I cleared the nearby houses, it was pitch black and the sky was full of stars. To the north I could see the dancing Northern Lights, nowhere near as bright or as colourful as you see in photos, I only ever seem to see a dull greenish glow to the north, but still a great sight. I think the best display would have been last night, but we didn't have the clear skies then. In one memorable moment, what looked like a spotlight appeared low on the horizon and shone a green beam of light across the sky. It was almost like some huge rock concert happening to the north. Then the spotlight disappeared and all was black again.

Except that all wasn't black, because much more impressive than the Northern Lights, overhead was the amazing Milky Way. The only time that I have seen this so well before was in New Zealand in 2020. Looking at it through binoculars it's just a staggering amount of stars forming what looks to the naked eye like a grey misty band across the black sky. 100–400 billion stars apparently make up the Milky Way, and at least that number of planets. 

Then over the east I could see the planet Jupiter glowing bright, the biggest planet in our solar system who's gravitational pull can be felt here on earth. Tonight I could even see a couple of its moons through binoculars. As I watched, a shooting star appeared, it shot across the sky and then went out as quickly as it had appeared. Time for bed.

A day of passage on Barra

Passage is picking up with whooper swans and barnacle geese starting to pass over in increasing numbers, all coming in off the Atlantic ocean to the west and heading east/south east. Whoopers breed in Iceland and the barnacles nearly twice that distance in Greenland. Most barnacles stop off in Iceland on their journey to Scotland, but even so these swans and geese have travelled over 1000km (600 miles) of open sea to get to Barra which is the first land they have seen since they left home. They don't rest on the sea they just do it in one go, and yet even so when the reach here, very few land on Barra, they just keep on going until they reach the Inner Hebridean islands such as Islay a further 150km (90 miles) south east. This is awe-inspiring visible migration and one of the highlights of an October trip to Barra.

Barnacle geese passing over.