2nd August

Well, what a shocker: with the island enveloped in mizzly, swirling low cloud for the best part of the morning sightings of any sort were at a premium and even an eventual clearance revealed little of particular note. A small flurry of 25 or so Willow Warblers that had dropped in overnight at the Obs were the only passerine migrants of interest, whilst an increase to 74 in the Ringed Plover tally - along with 47 Dunlin, 7 Sanderlings and a Redshank - was an on-cue event at Ferrybridge.

Overnight mothing was as poor as it's been for many weeks with an especially lame tally of immigrants that included nothing of any particular interest.

August is certainly Ringed Plover month at Ferrybridge, with their highest totals of the year invariably coming in the next few weeks as southbound migrants bolster the small resident population (...do we actually know for sure that the local breeders remain here year-round or is that just a lazy surmise?) and the arriving winterers © Martin Cade:

Thanks to the dusking efforts of Will Soar and Sarah Morrison at Freshwater Bay we were treated today to our just about annual sight of a Beech-green Carpet at its only Dorset resort. Although it's well known that an awful lot of the speciality indigenous moths of Portland either don't occur or are surprisingly infrequent right out at the Bill we've always thought it really peculiar that Beech-green Carpet has never once been recorded in the Obs garden in getting on for 60 years of intensive light-trapping; we can understand micros with obscure habits not straying to the Bill but, at least when you see them flying in torch light, Beech-green Carpets look to be decent enough flyers and aren't at all uncommon within sight of the Obs in, for example, the East Cliff quarries © Martin Cade: