19th May

What can we say about today that we haven't said about almost every day this month? The clear skies and soft breeze kept land-based migrant action to a minimum. A small movement of Hirundines up the West Cliffs was brightened for one observer by an Osprey that made a brief appearance before heading back out to sea. The ringing was quiet once more with some small signs of the local breeders success, plus a Spotted Flycatcher and a Willow Warbler. The Gull flock continues to grow and it finally did its job at attracting other sea birds with a very close Balearic Shearwater joining in the fray around a fishing boat, whilst an Arctic Skua caused a mighty furore before continuing its journey east. A slack handful of other notable birds included singles of summer plumage Turnstone and Purple Sandpiper at the Bill, along with a singing male Wheatear.

Attentive visitors to the blog with have noticed that there are now far more years available in the archive of previous blog posts - there are links to these in the side bar to the right of this post. Visitors might recollect that when we switched from our old website to the current Blogger-hosted site access to the archives on the old site was lost; we of course retained offline copies of these but it's taken this long to finally upload them to the blog. For this we have to thank Joe Stockwell and the corona virus outbreak: having been furloughed from work Joe kindly volunteered to spend some time getting the old files into a suitable format and uploading them; at present the text is all in situ in whole year blocks but the photographs need to be individually uploaded which will take a lot more time. Many thanks Joe.

Also maybe of interest, we've finally remembered to upload a lepidoptera report for 2019 - the link to this is also on the right or just click here).