Portland Bird Observatory and Field Centre: 23rd October

After more than 70 years of fieldwork at Portland any record-breaking event is going to be something fairly special, and so it proved with today's whopping passage of 110000 southbound Wood Pigeons that was such a spectacle that even members of public were asking us what on earth was going on. There looked to be a lot of promise in the day's relative calmness and early cloud cover but by way of grounded arrivals the quality left it until late, with singles of Radde's Warbler and Pallas's Warbler found almost simultaneously at Reap Lane and the Obs respectively late in the afternoon; earlier, another Hawfinch made a typically blink and you miss it visit to Avalanche Road, 2 Yellow-browed Warblers and a Dartford Warbler were at Thumb Lane and a Merlin and a Firecrest at the Bill. With the ground disappointingly quiet for more routine arrivals there was plenty of attention given to events overhead where, in addition to the pigeons, 570 Goldfinches, 520 Linnets, 420 Jackdaws, 400 Chaffinches, 350 Meadow Pipits, 110 Starlings, 90 Pied Wagtails, 60 Skylarks, 29 Siskins, 20 Swallows, 12 Cormorants, 11 Redwings, 10 Reed Buntings, 8 Bramblings, 7 Greenfinches, a Golden Plover and a Redpoll were amongst the movers over the Bill. On a shearwater-free seawatch, 250 Mediterranean Gulls, 5 Brent Geese and 2 Arctic Skuas were as good as it got off the Bill.

With a bit of wishful thinking you could almost imagine it's on a par with Little Bustard migration in Azerbaijan - certainly the numbers aren't much different. Autumn Wood Pigeon passage today reached what for us was an almost unimaginable peak of a six figure total; our previous record was only established a year ago when 41000 passed over on 5th November, so today's 110000 was seriously impressive both as a statistic and a spectacle © Martin Cade:

Well, you can see it's a Pallas's Warbler even if you can't see very much of it © Martin Cade...

...Due to a comedy of errors we missed the best value on the Pallas's Warbler: we were away attending to business in Weymouth at the end of the afternoon when our visiting ringers found it in a mist-net at the Obs just as the nets were being packed up for the day. News didn't circulate for a while and also not before we'd been sidetracked by a wild goose chase for the Radde's Warbler at Reap Lane; once we were back at the Obs it proved - as can been seen from the photograph above - to be extremely elusive. In-hand photo © Glen Maddison:

Migrant moth nos at the Obs picked up a little overnight and incl the first Cosmopolitan of the year; yet another Marbled Fern nitidalis (6th of the month) also of note

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— Portland Bird Observatory (@portlandbirdobs.bsky.social) October 23, 2024 at 12:47 PM