The day's only reports were from the Bill where 4 Chiffchaffs, 2 Spotted Flycatchers and a Cuckoo made up the migrant tally on the ground and a couple of Sandwich Terns passed through on the sea.
Immigrant interest in the moth traps has diminished to the extent that we'd forgotten to mention what little there'd been in the last couple of days; a Rusty-dot Pearl was the sole representative at the Obs last night.
The fact that we haven't recently reported on any developments with Nick Hopper's nocturnal sound-recording project has only been down to fact that we've all been very busy with other jobs - Nick's been recording on quite a few nights and in particular has been refining placement of the equipment to achieve better results (as might be expected at Portland, the issue of wind noise - both in itself or from creaking branches, rustling leaves and the like - has been quite a bugbear) and refining his analysis of the sound files; we've picked four recordings from the last few weeks as examples of recent 'captures'. Waders - particularly Dunlin, Whimbrel and Common Sandpiper - have been quite numerous...
...but this Dotterel was a surprise, even if it wasn't recognised at the time; in this case Nick had to call on the services of Magnus Robb for an ID.
As the project keeps revealing, some of the fly-overs are quite wacky - what's this Sandwich Tern up to at 3 in the morning?
And, finally, there have been some really nice recordings of the more typical nocturnal inhabitants of the Bill:
