A slight improvement today, with a brisk and suddenly very chilly northeasterly dropping a good deal more than we'd grown accustomed to in recent days. There certainly wasn't anything like a proper fall at the Bill, but
Swifts and
hirundines were moving in strength - including
Swallows getting into four figures and both
Swift and
House Martin well into three figures, whilst a miscellany of grounded migrants and other diurnal movers included 15
Yellow Wagtails, 6
Spotted Flycatchers, 3
Whinchats, 3
Reed Warblers, 2 each of
Hobby,
Sedge Warbler and
Garden Warbler and a single
Pied Flycatcher; at least another 15
Spotted Flycatchers were scattered elsewhere. It seemed that the wind was a little too offshore and sea rewards were correspondingly reduced, with 3
Arctic Skuas, 2
Great Northern Divers, a
Red-throated Diver and a few
Manx Shearwaters,
Black-headed Gulls and
waders the best of it between the Bill and Chesil.
Hardly a surprise since there's been a little influx of them in recent days and a visiting moth-trapper had even caught one elsewhere on the island a couple of nights ago, but a Striped Hawkmoth was a nice overnight catch in one of the Obs garden moth-traps. We're fortunate that some of these scarcer migrants are so relatively regular for us and, thanks to the sterling services of Martin King who over the last winter digitized our hitherto very disorganised migrant moth records, we can now straight away discover that this was in fact the 77th Striped Hawk ever trapped at the Obs - thanks Martin, you've saved us an awful lot of tedious data entry! © Martin Cade:
