11th May

With the wind having dropped overnight and the sun rising into a clear blue sky, our idyllic dawn on the Obs patio was interrupted by a sudden 'chiach'. The joking responses of "haha, sounds like a Chough", turned into more frantic calls of "CHOUGH", as the round winged corvid flapped into view. A quick dash to Culverwell saw the bird settled and in classic form with its head raking through the horse dung in the fields below. The bird remained flighty throughout the day but returned frequently to both the fields below Culverwell and the exposed soil on the East Cliffs. This undoubted highlight of the day was seconded by the return of the flightly male Serin to the garden (there can't have been many places today that heard the distinct call of a Chough overlaid by the trill of a Serin). Away from the excitement, the Bill was quiet with just a smattering of common migrants including: eight Yellow Wagtails, three Lesser Whitethroats, and singles of Garden Warbler and Spotted Flycatcher. The sea ticked over once again with three Pomarine Skuas, five Arctic Skuas, two Bonxies and nine Great Northern Divers through off the Bill and three each of Pomarine and Arctic Skua lingering off Chesil Cove during the evening.

It's been 20 years and 5 days since the last Chough set foot on Portland. The four individuals that turned up during that spring of 2001 coincided with the foot-and-mouth outbreak of that year when access to the coastal fringe at the Bill was restricted; most views of those birds were necessarily distant and very few worthwhile images were taken - that was not the case today! © Debby Saunders...



...© Sarah Hodgson...


...and © Svetlana Ashby:


Through the middle of the day it moved from the horse/sheep paddocks below Culverwell to the East Cliffs where it spent a long time digging and displacing stones on the crumbling clifftop © Geoff Orton:


A bit of video to set the scene...


...as usual with Choughs, it was very vocal © Martin Cade:


Among today's extras, a Hobby at the Bill...


...and six Eider through on the sea that are surely the same group that seems to stuck in some sort of nightmarish never-ending circuit of the island © Pete Saunders: