Barra isn't only about rarities, thankfully. There's also plenty of resident
birds to keep you entertained if the rares don't show up, as is the case at
the moment. Today we saw four eagles, three white-tailed and a single golden,
male hen harrier and three great northern divers. The white-tailed eagles in
particular can be very obliging and are often seen well. The bird in the
photos flew low over the church at Eoligarry.
White-tailed eagles have proportionally long necks when compared to golden
eagles, which gives them a very different jizz, but to be honest there's not
really much chance of confusing the two, with white-tailed appearing much
larger.
One of the reasons I love this island is that you get to experience some impressive passage. Barnacle geese and whooper swans are yet to come, hopefully next week, and we also get other species that you might not expect arriving from over the sea, such as flocks of snipe. Highlight of the day today was the passage of sooty shearwaters which went down the east coast of the island, heading south in their hundreds. 508 in total were logged, one of the highest counts ever. Although I've seen sooty shearwaters many times before, I've never experienced anything quite like this.
This video is a very short zoomed in section of the previous video. Three
birds arc across the screen and are obviously shearwaters. I noticed straight
away that at least one of them had a large amount of white on its belly, but
which species? Manx is the obvious answer, yet nine days later we discovered
that there was a flock of over 1000 great shearwaters between Barra and Coll
when only single figures of Manx were seen. So could these be great
shearwaters? Well, the first thing is, from the video I would say that they
look big and long winged. Difficult to judge though because they were so far
out. I recorded the original video on 60x optical through the scope and 2x
digital on the phone, so a combined magnification of 120x. These birds were
probably around 3.5km distant (2 miles).
This is about the clearest screen grab I can get from the video. The original
was at 120x, this has been cropped to within an inch of it's life! At a rough
estimate I would say that this must be around at least 300x magnification and
any attempt at identification must bear this in mind. Yet clearly it's a
shearwater from the flight action in the video, clearly it has a white belly
and underwing, it appears to have dark undertail coverts and may even have a
dark neck patch. I wouldn't claim this as a great shearwater had we not seen
them from the ferry
a few days later on 12th October, yet it's obvious to me that it most probably is one.
Meanwhile the other two birds in the group appear to have dark caps
and at least some white in the tail. Even the primaries look darker than the
rest of the wing. These are not sooty shearwaters and dark caps and white in
the tail only point in one direction and it certainly isn't Manx.
Ultimately I didn't see these birds in the field, I only noticed them from very poor video grabs, so I was never going to tick them and even now it would be ridiculous to claim them as anything more than possible great shearwater. But actually, we all know what they are, especially armed as we are now with the knowledge that there was a large flock of great shearwaters off Barra at the same time.
Eoligarry church, home to many a rarity in the past, most notably American
redstart. A little bunting was seen here this morning, but not seen by us.
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