Aurora borealis: <b>2004 - Welcome to birding Shetland style</b>

February 02, 2005

2004 - Welcome to birding Shetland style

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In the abscence of any new birds to report, now seems like a good time to look back at 2004, my first full year on the island. Plus it's as good an excuse as any to put all the rarity photos together in one place!

It was certainly a year of adjustments for me in terms of what to expect around the house - in my village in the south-east of England I was used to all the usual garden species, plus a few somewhat more scarce species like Grey Partridge, Turtle Dove, Corn Bunting and Little Owl. It's now been 18 months since I last saw a Blue Tit... On the other hand, I can now seawatch from the kitchen window, and regularly expect the usual suspects of Gannet, Shag, Kittiwake, Fulmar and Black Guillemot. Great Northern Divers are resident offshore in the winter and spring, and Red-throated Divers breed a few hundred yards away from the house. Occasional Eider and Long-tailed Ducks mooch around offshore in the winter, and Otters are if not regular, then certainly seen every few weeks. This winter we've had a female Otter hanging out in our peat shed, swearing at us as we go to collect a new sack of peats for the fire.

I've traded my garden breeding birds in the south (Wren, Great Tit, Song Thrush, Blackbird and Collared Dove) for a suite of waders on and around our land - I can lie in bed at night in the early summer and listen to Redshank, Oystercatcher, Lapwing, Ringed Plover, Curlew, Whimbrel, Golden Plover, and drumming Snipe.

My flock of chickens used to just attract Starlings and House Sparrows; it still does, but has also dragged in Woodcock, Twite, Brambling, Snow Bunting and Siskin.

As for the scarce and rare stuff... my local patch I define as the peninsular at the north-east end of the island on which our croft is roughly central - an area approximately 1.5 miles long, a mixture of some green fields bounded by fences and stone dykes, a little maritime heath, some herb-rich grassland, a small plantation of conifers and deciduous shrubs, some small patches of vegetables, a wild golf course, lots of peat moorland, two small bodies of fresh water, a gravel airstrip, and surrounded on three sides by the sea. It's a wonderfully diverse habitat mosaic really, and so it's no surprise that the bird list is so good. And being on the east it's the first landfall for many migrants...

I arrived in late 2003, in time to see Pallas's Grasshopper Warbler, Olive-backed Pipit, Buff-breasted Sandpiper and Great Grey Shrike. I couldn't wait to see what 2004 would bring...

The first rarity of the year was a female Sardinian Warbler that JL and I found on JL's birthday in the plantation; an incredible skulker, it was initially impossible to assign it to any species apart from a dark sylvia sp; it took a couple of days before JL saw it perched out in the open and could clinch it as Sardinian.

(3rd for Shetland)

For me the most notable thing about spring migration were Red-backed Shrikes - several females, and eventually my first male in the UK. Summer was notable for the Storm Petrels swirling round my moth trap one still humid evening. Autumn started fairly promisingly, with B's mist nets in the plantation yielding Wryneck and Barred, Icterine and Grasshopper Warblers in August. A small fall of Marsh Warblers hinted at better warblers to come, and in September this seemed about to be abundantly fulfilled. A screaming south-easterly gale produced another mystery warbler, a good-sized and seemingly long-tailed locustella. All three of us saw it in flight, myself only the once, and JL and B heard it call ("pet"). But every time it flushed it flew high, so it evaded the nets, and so was never pinned down. What was it? Given what turned up in the same gale, I hate to think...

...JL found a shrike sp below our croft in shocking weather conditions one evening, but despite our searching we couldn't relocate it. The following morning I briefly glimpsed it facing away from me on a fence, and assumed it must be a female Red-backed. Oops. JL found it later in the morning, and immediately realised he'd got a good 'un - either Brown or Isabelline. It flew into the heligoland just as I arrived back - the emotion of looking into the trapping box and seeing an adult male cristatus Brown Shrike looking back up at me will live with me for years! What on earth could that warbler have been?!

(3rd for Shetland, 5th for Britain, still less than 10 European records)

We had few spells of south-easterlies after this, but nothing exceptional turned up - just Wood Warbler, Red-breasted Flycatcher, and a Bluethroat. However, there was still one last big surprise left in the year in October, when B found a dark wheatear on the roadside below the croft. It flew up to outside our crofthouse, and perched up on a gatepost - Pied Wheatear! It gave excellent views, but gradually became flightier, and gave us several hours runaround while we tried to keep up with it as it headed inland; poor JL was off the island, and it took him until the early evening to return and refind it.

(5th for Shetland)

Other birds of note on the island but not on my patch during the autumn included Yellow-browed Warbler, Rose-coloured Starling and Citrine Wagtail. It took me a while to catch up with a Waxwing, though P and JL had seen several earlier. 'Northern' Bullfinches were much easier - large, chunky finches with a buzzy "toot" call. One female has stayed into 2005 on the island. A Great Grey Shrike on my patch gave me 3 shrike species in 2004 seen from the house/land; it could so easily have been 4 on the island if only the convincing descriptions of Lesser Grey JL was told had been reported to him sooner!

However, elsewhere on the islands I saw Lesser Grey Shrike in the summer, and White's Thrush and Chestnut-eared Bunting in the autumn. If only the Rufous-tailed Robin had stuck around...

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