Another day of lovely warmth and sunshine that, after a bright, moonlit night, did rather subdue the number of grounded migrants. Blackcaps and Chiffchaffs were again in the several dozen each at the Bill, but 20 Wheatears was the next highest total there and the other routine padders barely reached that total cumulatively, with a Cetti's Warbler at Culverwell the only newcomer of significance; elsewhere, the 2 Curlew Sandpipers were still at Ferrybridge. It was busier overhead although not really as busy as the conditions might have promised; Swallows totalled well into four figures but Meadow Pipits only just scraped past 400 and 4 Cattle Egrets, 3 Grey Herons, 2 Lapwings and a Hobby were the best of the oddities. The sea was again well worth attention, with 300 Kittiwakes and 200 Mediterranean Gulls a constant presence and 1000 auks, 31 Common Scoter, 12 Balearic Shearwaters, 12 Arctic Skuas and 5 Teal among the movers off the Bill.
It's sad to see the Swallows gathering before departing for another year but they were looking great against today's cloudless sky © Martin Cade:
Highlight of today was this early autumn juvenile Cetti’s Warbler. #culverwell @portlandbirdobs.bsky.social
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— Mark Cutts (@slashercutts.bsky.social) September 24, 2026 at 1:51 PM
Think it's probably a wee bit too early in the autumn to qualify yet as an Indian summer but we're loving it being so hot that we're back in flip-flops having an Al fresco lunch in the CEF whilst catching a steady trickle of Swallows - nice!
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— Portland Bird Observatory (@portlandbirdobs.bsky.social) September 24, 2026 at 1:33 PM
Although avian scarcities have been pretty thin on the ground so far this autumn we've got a lot of mileage out of various interesting bugs, not the least of which have been all the Lesser Emperor dragonflies in the last couple of weeks. Since there had been a scatter of previous island records over the last few years we'd been pretty baffled as to why we weren't seeing any at the Bill; however, an apparent influx of migrant individuals has seen them logged daily in some numbers on the warm, sunny days just lately. The vast majority of them have been seen quartering the fields rather than visiting ponds and we haven't actually managed to find a single one settled - these two individuals from yesterday and today, a male and a female, were both extracted from mist-nets and subsequently posed...
ID-wise, the only other large-ish dragonflies on the wing during this period have been Migrant Hawkers that are still pretty numerous and are much more colourful than the Lesser Emperors...
...and Emperors that are still about here and there - particularly at the pond in Yeolands Quarry - and are also much more colourful and shouldn't usually pose a problem:
However, we did come a cropper during our learning stage and had to be corrected by Phil Saunders and Brett Spencer when we assumed this drab emperor settled at Culverwell was also a Lesser Emperor (we did wonder why, amongst other things, it didn't have the thin yellow band at the top of the abdomen) but it's actually a very mature Emperor; we were fooled by the isolated blue saddle and drab abdomen and overlooked, for example, the green thorax that of course should be browner if it were a Lesser Emperor.
Since pretty well all the views of the Lesser Emperors are of them whizzing about over the fields we've been trying to get some flight photos of them to convey their usual appearance in these circumstances and on a lot of these we've been surprised how apparently greenish the sides of the thorax can look at times (per Brett, on a Lesser Emperor you'd expect to see a contrast between the green eyes and brown thorax, whereas on an Emperor they're both green) - amongst many afflictions, we are slightly colour-blind so this might just be be a personal perception issue rather than a pitfall that anyone else might want to consider © Martin Cade & Jodie Henderson:
