The last couple of days on Barra - bringing up 100 species

The weather for the past couple of days has been challenging with strong winds and heavy squally showers. Even so we've managed to see lots of great birds and had some wonderful experiences. For example, at Allasdale today we came across a flock of around 200 barnacle geese on the short grass. These geese are newly arrived from Greenland and are resting up before they continue their journey to other parts of the Hebrides, most likely Islay.

Suddenly the flock took to the air as a magnificent white-tailed eagle flew in and tried to take them by surprise. These eagles are well capable of taking a barnacle goose in flight and the flock flew back and forth for 10 minutes as the eagle flew around before heading off empty handed. A different eagle was also seen trying to take a glossy ibis up at Eoligarry two days ago, but not by us! Yesterday we saw a golden eagle on Vatersay, the only one of the holiday for us this year.

On the sea at Allasdale we came across these six long-tailed ducks, as well as about 20 eiders and three species of diver.

A whinchat was a surprise find by Bruce at Eoligarry today, and is my latest ever in the UK and only my third ever in October. 

Even more surprising than the whinchat, we later visited the jetty at Eoligarry and had a little tern fly right past us at close range, my latest little tern in the UK by nearly a month. Most likely a 1st winter bird I think. As usual there were at least a couple of great northern divers offshore and a few flocks of barnacle geese flew through heading south east.

Scanning through the brent goose flock it's clear that they've had a good breeding season, with around 60% of the birds currently at Traigh Mhor being juveniles.

Ardmhor plantation.

So it's the end of an excellent two weeks on Barra when we saw 104 species including 2 North American passerines, 2 North American ducks, Arctic warbler, 2 common rosefinch, 9 glossy ibis, self found yellow-browed warbler and osprey (only the 5th ever autumn record), 3 species of diver, 2 species of eagle including white-tailed eagle hunting migrating barnacle geese, migrating whooper swans, otters etc.  Not a bad tally. Looking forward to next year already!