5th October

If we'd have known just how many thrushes and Robins had been passing over during the hours of darkness - overnight recordings later revealed a steady passage that included the first Redwings of the autumn - we might have been even more geared up for the day that we were at dawn when it soon apparent that there were plenty of Chiffchaffs and Blackcaps about at the Obs. Sadly, however, it proved to be one of those days when pretty well everything left as soon as the sun got up and later toil turned up nothing in numbers and, the lingering Moorfield Road Hoopoe aside, nothing of quality. The hitherto also lingering Turtle Dove at Culverwell only showed once at dawn , with 3 Snipe were the only other even faintly less regular migrants to report from the Bill. Elsewhere, 2 Redstarts were at Wakeham and another Snipe passed over at the Grove. The only sea news was of a lone Balearic Shearwater through off the Bill.

Despite another impressive large catch of moths at all sites immigrants remained rather less numerous as might have been hoped given the conditions, with singles of Gem and White-speck the best of the scarcities at the Obs.