11th May

Today's results would have looked sad indeed without a spirited contribution from the sea - even if those rewards required a good deal of effort to eke out. With rain always threatening but holding off until late in the morning there was ample time available to tap into an impressive passage of 12 Great Northern Divers through off the Bill. Skuas continued to trickle by, with 3 Arctics and a Pomarine through, whilst a Little Gull was a very belated first of the season there; the highlight however was an unseasonable Sooty Shearwater heading west just as the rain set in. A very poor showing from the land included the customary post-rain increase in waders, with 40 Dunlin, 17 Sanderling, 7 Bar-tailed Godwits and 3 Whimbrel at Ferrybridge, but precious little evidence of passerine arrivals: Wheatear, with 7 at the Bill and a scatter elsewhere, was the only migrant managing a total of more than one! A light trickle of Swifts, including 29 inbound at the Bill, provided the only evidence of overhead passage.

There are few more impressive seawatch sights at Portland than a throttle-down, Iceland-bound Great Northern Diver all but skimming the top of the Obelisk as it rounds the Bill...

...this year's meagre Pomarine Skua tally advances by another one...

...and Little Gull finally gets on the Bill year-list...

..the chief prize of the morning watch at the Bill though was this Sooty Shearwater - May records here are extremely few and far between and we're not at all sure how many of the old ones would stand up to modern scrutiny. At first glance it was an entirely typical Sooty in all respects and gave no indication that it might, for example, be something more exciting like a Short-tailed Shearwater that's suddenly been elevated to the league of faint possibilities these days - it was only when we inspected the photographs and realised that it was in very obvious flight-feather moult that some alarm bells rung as we'd imagined a Sooty shouldn't be in this state in early May. It seems from the literature that moult of this extent in adults ought only to be visible further into the summer when the birds should to be in the mid- or northeast Atlantic; on that basis perhaps the most likely explanation is that it's a non-breeding youngster (you'd expect them to beginning moulting considerably earlier than breeding adults) that's swilling around in the wrong part of the Atlantic © Martin Cade:

And for today's bit of moving action we've got one of the Great Northern Divers passing the Bill. You really don't appreciate just how fast these birds are flying until you try to keep up with them in the viewfinder - this little clip is slowed up to half speed © Martin Cade: