Fetlar 2024. I must have arrived in the monsoon season......

The rest of my trip finished as it started. Lots of walking in high winds and rain. The rain was so heavy on occasions that I had no option but to give up & go back to the accommodation to sit it out.  Wednesday was no exception and after sitting in most of the morning I decided to drive the short distance to Funzi willows once the rain had eased from torrential to just ‘heavy’. Thermal imaging has become very popular now in general birding after starting to gain recognition among ringers for pinpointing birds  on the ground at night allowing them to be ‘lamped’ and caught in a landing net. Its vastly increased the catch rate of scarce to catch birds such as Skylark, Woodcock & Jack Snipe and will help greatly with our understanding of the movements of these birds and their winter site fidelity - already ringing recaptures are showing winter on winter site fidelity for Woodcock & Jack Snipe. Amyway, another digression, I’ve got a thermal imager and it’s proved remarkable at picking up birds that can’t be seen through the binoculars. This Woodcock in the plantation above Feal Burn was one such bird. I wouldn’t have seen it if it wasn’t for the thermal picking up a heat signal!

It also helped at Funzi willows where, thanks to the thermal, I tracked down three heat sources one of which was my 1st Fetlar Barred Warbler! Another proved to be this rather smart looking Siberian Chiffchaff. 

Compare this to the regular collybita and more easten but not quite east enough abietinus type from N and NE Europe that were knocking arond the Feal plantation. The Siberian bird is very monochromatic without a hint of yellow or green whereas the collybita shows typical Chiffchaff green / yellow colouration and the abietinus is somewhere in between.

collybita Chiffchaff

abietunus Chiffchaff

Returning to the car I realised I’d missed a call off Paul Macklam  about a really good looking candidate for Eastern Yellow Wagtail he’d found near Aith Bod! Within a couple of minutes I arrived on site to find Paul standing looking in to a nearby field where he’d last seen the bird. He showed me the photos on the back of his camera & it looked spot on as did the call he’d heard it give. A quick search,  in the by now torrential again rain,  and we relocated it a couple of hundred metres up a small burn. I tried to get a sound recording but unfortunately there was to much wind noise but, by some miracle, Jane Turner managed to isolate some part calls by filtering out the wind noise. Cheers Jane!  She sent me photos of the sonograms compared to Eastern Yellow Wagtail & Paul will submit these as part of his submission. Unfortunately the bird was never seen again and the burn it was found beside burst its banks in extremely wet overnight weather. In fact much of Fetlar was flooded by Thursday morning snd Feal Burn had expanded to fill the whole valley! 

Rough seas viewed from Houbie

Travel problems are usual in the northern isles. Normally it’s due to adverse weather but an accident aboard one of the ferries (a concrete truck toppled over onto a pick up ) meant it was out of service and the remaining ferry was running a Saturday schedule only. A phone call from the ferry company on Thursday advised me to leave earlier than expected at 16.30 on Friday. By Friday morning they’d revised this to 10.40 because of expected force 9 gales later in the day. This just gave me time to get up early and do a quick tour of the plantation & the area surrounding Houbie where the sunshine had even got the local Shetland Wrens out singing rather than hiding in the undergrowth.

Shetland Wren sheltering from the rain beneath a gunnera leaf

Arriving on Shetland mainland in the forecast gale force winds it was obvious birding was going to be difficult. I decided to try for the White-winged Scoter at Wadbister and initially got distant views but when I returned a bit later it showed much better - certainly through Adrian Kettle’s scope! I also met Mike Edgecombe at the site and as we were chatting the flock of Eider and the scoter took off allowing a distant record shot.

White-winged Scoter in flight with Eider

Same photo above cropped right in to show pink bill of White-winged Scoter
rather than yellow of Velvet Scoter

News that Cliff & Ollie had found a Golden Oriole in the community woodland at Brae had us heading g that way as both Mike & I were staying in Brae that night albeit in separate hotels. No luck with the Oriole although we did manage to see two Hawfinches that were furtively feeding on the ground beneath various bushes! Mike invited me to join him for dinner and after a nice meal & a pint I headed back to get some needed sleep. 

My last morning dawned slightly misty but calm and after a huge breakfast I decided to head south and try Quendale for a Great Grey Shrike that had been showing g unbelievably well feasting off a mouse it had ‘lardered’ the previous day. I love shrikes & Great Greys in particular. My 1st Great Grey Shrike was self found, as a young teenage birder, in Linneage Woods, Suffolk where we lived at the time. Unfortunately they’ve become an increasingly scarce winter visitor to the UK and it’s been several years since I’ve seen one and even longer since I’ve seen a Cheshire one! In fact in recent years I’ve seen more ‘isabelline’ shrikes than Great Grey.

Arriving at Quendale on a by now beautiful sunny day I had a search around the mill and farm buildings with no success. Bumping into old friend and Shetland resident Lee Mott we were standing chatting when he suddenly saw the shrike fly up into a sycamore. From there it flew across the road and perched up on a strategically placed fence post the farmer had left for this very occasion! 

Saying my goodbyes to Lee I left for the airport but just had time to calm into Grutness to see the nice flock of 38 Long-tailed Ducks in the bay! Another autumn trip to Shetland finished for the year. Even though good birds were few and far between it was great to meet up  with other friends I hadn't seen for a while.

Fetlar 2024. Wind and more wind

Fetlars been extremely windy and  often very wet during my recent stay. In fact the only time I recall so much wind was in the house I shared with three mates in Stretford, whilst at Manchester University in the late 70's early 80's, on a Saturday morning......... Friday nights out on the town would often finish at the infamous Plaza Cafe run by the indomitable Charlie. This curry house was open until the early hours of the morning and served three kinds of curry sauce - mild, hot and suicide. Formica topped tables, plastic beer glasses with water in and plates full of popadoms. The safest option was the chicken curry and this used to arrive on a pile of rice with the curry sauce of your choice in a separate jug.  It was rumoured that some zoology students had taken some bones back to the labs and analysed them  and they weren't what they expected ....put it this way. You never saw any cats around the Plaza!  The few people I knew who tried the suicide sauce left on heir hands and knees and claimed they couldn't taste anything for weeks. The local police used to park up outside just to laugh at the students leaving worse for wear in the early hours of the morning. I did know an Iraqi PhD student called Jamal who ordered the suicide sauce. Drank it with a spoon and said to Charlie, 'I've finished my soup can I have the main course please........' The look on Charlies face was priceless and Jamal was a legend in the Williamson Building from then on.

Plaze cafe menu courtesy of the internet!

Anyway,  I  digress. Fetlar has been extremely windy! Its made birding very hard and its been a slog to try and find anything. My best finds so far have been Moorhen (!), Common Rosefinch and adult Glaucous Gull. As soon as a small bird is found its gone with the wind! Like many other birders I'm lamenting the number of commoner migrants. I've not see n a Whitethroat or Lesser Whitethroat since arriving and only one Garden Warbler. Small number of Goldcrests and winter thrushes have been passing through including my first Fieldfare of the autumn. Wildfowl is arriving in small numbers and the best of these have been a female Scup found by Mark, on Papil Water,  before  I arrived and a Long-tailed Duck I found on Funzi Loch.

Female type Scaup

Long-tailed Duck

Some of the days have been been beautifully sunny but still windy! Summers hanging on in sheltered areas with Sheeps Bit Scabious and Ragged Robin flowering in the mires.

Ragged Robin

Sheeps Bit Scabious

Full English in a pie! 

Tunnocks Tea Cakes - a highlight of my annual trips to the northern isles

One of the undoubted highlights of the week has been seeing Comet A3 (Tsuchinshan-Atlas )  as the clouds miraculously cleared for an hour or so on Monday night. This comet was last seen from earth in Neanderthal times and I mulled over the fact that I might be the first person ever to have seen it on Fetlar. With only 50 or so inhabitants its quite likely. I don't think Fetlar was inhabited that long ago and was first inhabited in the Bronze Age.  What a thought! 

Thermal imaging has been a recent development in birding and mine has proved its worth this week. Many birds are hunkered down out the wind but the thermal has picked up a heat signature and allowed me to pick up birds otherwise invisible when just using binoculars.  A case in point is this newly arrived Woodcock found in the plantation up Feal Burn - an area I've been checking 2-3 times daily. It was sitting tight and without the thermal I'd have missed it.

Using the thermal to check for heat signatures in thick vegetation

Woodcock found using the thermal 

I watched 4 Redwing drop into the tops of some pine trees in the plantation. I could see them through the thermal but could not pick them out in the binoculars!

My accommodation is right by the sea, at Houbie, so there's always something to look at from the windows even when its to wet to go out.  The strong southerly winds blew this adult winter plumaged Kittiwake into the bay and I braved the weather to get a couple of photographs as it fed close to shore occasionally plunge diving after some small morsel in the surf.

Greylag Geese are feature of autumns / winters on Shetland. These originate from Iceland and most are genuinely wild birds compared to the feral birds we see in Cheshire. Large numbers winter on Fetlar and I make a point of checking them all  as they can bea carrier species for  something more unusual such as last weeks Barnacle Goose or Pinkfeet.

Although its been hard going I keep telling myself I've got two more days here before starting the long journey home. Tomorrow's another day and it only takes one good bird.............

Fetlar 2024. Part 1. High winds and heavy rain

My trip to Fetlar didn't get off to the most auspicious of starts. Leaving home, in Cheshire, at just after 3 am Friday morning I made good time and arrived at Glasgow airport for my supposed 10.15 am flight to Sumburgh where I was picking up a hire car and taking a leisurely journey north to Fetlar via Tesco's in Lerwick and ferries across to Yell and ultimately Fetlar.

Unfortunately Loganair had other ideas. My flight was delayed by 5.5 hours! With absolutely no help from Loganair, apart from being messaged to advise our boarding card could be used to obtain £5.00 worth of food - not even enough for a meal deal at W H Smiths we were left to fend for ourselves. There was no one to ask 'airside' in the departures area and the 'customer relations' team we phoned on several occasions were about as useful as a chocolate fireguard. Its only when we saw 'our plane' being towed off the stand we realised we might be stuck in Glasgow overnight.  Thankfully, probably because it was going to cost them a fortune in putting us all up overnight, Loganair diverted a plane from Aberdeen. One of the airport ground staff told us before even Loganair knew themselves.

Eventually arriving in Sumburgh my now leisurely drive became a high speed dash up the spine of mainland Shetland with a quick 'supermarket trolley dash' into Tesco's before another quick stop at the animal feed store to pick up the obligatory sack of birdseed (more on that later) and then onto Toft for the somewhat later than I expected ferry across to Ulsta on Yell. Whilst talking to one of the ferry crew members he suggested that if I put my foot down I could actually make the original ferry I'd booked for Fetlar via Unst. Very kindly he let me off ahead of the two caravans that would have lost me valuable time. So, despite the best efforts of Loganair I arrived at our accommodation on Fetlar at 20.00 - almost 17 hours after leaving Cheshire.

Saturday was grim weather wise and it was a case of battening down the hatches and seeing what came to the bird seed spread liberally across the drive. It was great to catch up with Mark & Linda Sutton in their new camper van hear a bit more about their recent Australian birding odyssey. Later we met up with local birder Paul Macklam at the community hall social and quiz night. I'd last seen Paul two years ago on my last visit to Fetlar. A serious knee injury meant I couldn't make it last year.

Thankfully the weather improved Sunday but it was still windy with some heavy showers. A good solid 8 hours in the field and 26,000 steps didn't result in anything spectacular but after two days on inactivity it was good to stretch the legs and blow the cobwebs away. Two Yellow-browed Warblers and a handful of commoner migrants was scant reward. However, I did find a nice Siberian (tristis) Chiffchaff  at The Glebe and the local Golden Plover and Lapwing posed up a storm! 

Above: Siberian Chiffchaff

Unfortunately I didn't hear it call and to me the legs don't look black enough but none other than Killian Mullarney himself said it looked good  for 'tristis' so thats good enough for me! 

The scenery here can be spectacular and the skies and cloud formations are amazing. Our accommodation is at Houbie and close to one of the best birding spots on Fetlar - Feal Burn and the plantation. The usual routine is to walk the burn and check the plantation before coming back for a brew and then explore other sites on the island before doing the burn and plantation again late afternoon before it gets dark - birds are dropping in and moving down the island all the time so its worth checking sites more than once.

Looking up Feal Burn to the plantation

Tresta is another birding hotspot with the large garden at The Glebe (formerly the Manse) being well worth checking . Its held a host of good birds - including a Taiga Flycatcher I saw here in October 2009! See here. More recently I found the holy grail of birding finds when I stumbled upon a male Siberian Rubythroat in the garden of one of the crofts. Probably my finest birding hour. See here

You can see why expectations were high but, sadly, the only find was the afore mentioned Siberian Chiffchaff. It was good to catch up with the Barnacal Goose found by Linda a few days previously as it flew in wit ha flock of Greylag Geese.

Most of the Barnacle geese we see in Cheshire are probably of feral origin but this is likely to be  a genuinely wild bird.

I'm pleased to say the bird seed worked and among the throng of local House Sparrows and Starlings gorging themselves three Brambling were attracted down to the free meal.

It was also nice to catch up with this male Merlin hunting along the roadside at Funzie before perching up just long enough for a couple of photos. 

Fair Isle Bird Observatory.

Fair Isle Bird Observatory has been present in one form or another since 1948 when the original observatory was housed in a complex of old naval huts at North Haven. In 1969 a second newer Obs was built in the same location and this lasted until the 'new' obs was built in 2010.  Visited the 2nd incarnation of the Obs when twitching the UK"s first Citril Finch in 2008 and in later years stayed at the 'new' obs that opened in 2010. This unfortunately burnt down in march 2019 and its taken a long time for the Obs to be rebuilt. Fair Isle is a hard place to get to let alone build a brand new bird observatory akin to a 40 room 3 star hotel and it was no surprise that bad weather delayed the project and it was thrown into more disarray when the main contractor went into voluntary liquidation.  See here for a history of the Obs and here for details of the fire and rebuild.

Over the past three years we've watched as the new, new Obs has risen phenoix like from the ashes and during our recent visit got a tour of the new building by Chairman Dougie Barr. The orignianl project manager from the failed contracting company has been directly employed and the Obs committee are now managing the rest of the rebuild themselves. During our visit the place was buzzing with activity with 2nd fix electrics and plumbing being installed along with the sprinkler system. Theres still along way to go but it looks as if a full opening next autumn is well on schedule. By the end of this year there should be definite signs that the finish is in sight. Once the electrics are finished the suspended ceilings can be installed and the interior will look a lot different.

Inside theres a few changes to the original layout. There's no Obs shop and items for sale will be displayed in glass cases i nthe larger lounge area. The kitchen is larger as is the dining room and ringing room. The library is in a separate room whereas before it used to be accessed in the L shaped lounge. larger picture windows are fitted to the lounge and dining room for viewing the 'garden' plantation and nearby North Haven. Upstairs the rooms are either singles or twins with a disabled access room again on the ground floor as previously. The rooms are slightly smaller than previously but all have ensuite bathrooms. Theres a larger laundry room with separate washing machines for staff and residents use. Another major difference is the new building is rendered on the outside whereas the previous one was timber clad.

Previous Obs building was timber clad

The plan is to have a separate director of ornithology and director of hospitality and the accommodation ahs been designed as two separate flats or one big flat depending on whether its a couple who takeover the roles or two individuals. 

The devastating fire was caused by a faulty electrical connection from solar panels located on the roof. This time there will be a separate solar field on a nearby hillside with this being owned by the island and the electricity sold to the Obs.

View of the Obs whena pproaching along the road from the south with the 'directors' flats behind the vans

Front elevation 

Large picture windows in the lounge area

View looking back up to the Obs from North Haven

Side elevation showing the 'obs garden' plantation

Rear elevation with generator shed and 'garage' in foreground

Its a very impressive new building and once again will be at the heart of the islands community providing jobs and helping with the local economy.  Even the most tight fisted birders spend money on food and snacks so Stackhoull stores will benefit as will the islands community of Fair Isle knitters.  Heres hoping I get back next year and meet up with Alex, Luke & Jonny again.