The damp and murk that rolled in unforecast during the last hours of the night and persisted at intervals throughout the day might have been rather unpleasant but did the trick in driving an influx of shearwaters close to shore and also dropping slightly improved migrant numbers. Balearic Shearwaters featured most strongly off the Bill where, even allowing for duplication amongst the many that lingered, their tally likely topped three figures; Manx looked to be mostly moving through rather than lingering and probably reached the same sort of total, whilst singles of Cory's and Sooty - as well as 2 distant unidentified large shearwaters - also passed by without stopping. Eight Arctic Skuas, 6 Teal and 2 Great Skuas were also logged, with Mediterranean Gulls a constant presence in high numbers. On the ground the Willow Warbler total at the Bill reached 50 for the first time this autumn but 2 Pied Flycatchers and the season's first Spotted Flycatcher were all that could be mustered by way of more interesting variety around the south of the island and a Black-tailed Godwit was as good as it got amongst the reduced wader numbers at Ferrybridge. The overcast sky put paid to much visible passage beyond a few disorientated waders until the evening when in the late clearance one lucky observer jammed an Alpine Swift passing over Ferrybridge.
Pied Flycatcher at Sweethill © Debby Saunders...
...and this morning's Black-tailed Godwit at Ferrybridge © Pete Saunders:
Mandarins are great-looking birds but ultimately - like White-tailed Eagles, White Storks and all the other rubbish that on a whim it's the vogue to chuck out into the countryside - they're plastic eye-candy that deflect attention from the dire straits that so much indigenous flora and fauna finds itself in these days. For this reason alone they hardly merit a mention here, but in the light of last week's occurrence of one on a garden pond at Sweethill we ought to relate a twist to that tale: this morning a local Facebook page drew our attention to an unfamiliar duck on the relatively recently constructed ornamental waterfowl pond below the pumping station at Southwell (the one that had Black Swans amongst other things on it earlier in the year)...
...and on going to investigate we found that it was indeed the same female Mandarin; the bird's clearly capable of flight although it remains to be ascertained whether it's been released on the pond or has just randomly turned up after straying out from the mainland - maybe none of that matters as it's just something else that the general public can coo over as they connect with nature for a few minutes before resuming whatever it is that they do to fuel the engines of nature-destructive economic growth © Martin Cade:
