MEGA!!! Swainson's thrush, Barra

We'd just arrived back at our cottage this evening after a great day out, Ray was inside making a brew, I was outside cleaning the car windows (for once) when suddenly Ray appeared and told me to grab my birding gear because we needed to go, we were off back to Brevig. He'd just had a call off a bird ringer he knows, Mark Oksien, who had just caught a small American thrush at Creachan wood, the place we had left 15 minutes earlier! We dashed back to find that the identification had been confirmed as Barra's second Swainson's thrush. The bird was weighed, measured and ringed and then released. It flew into a nearby tree, perched up for a while and then disappeared.

Just the kind of bird we came to Barra to see, the weather systems are paying off already.