20th September

With the winds not picking up until well into the afternoon and the majority of the morning's rain showers managing to miss us entirely, there was certainly plenty of opportunity to tap into some migrants before conditions deteriorated rapidly and profoundly as a blasting gale swept in the coldest air of the autumn to date. Sadly for us, the calm before the storm failed to turn up much more than the lightest of spreads of routine grounded arrivals, with 3 Pied Flycatchers and a Firecrest at Thumb Lane, 2 Whinchats, a Common Sandpiper and a Spotted Flycatcher at the Bill and 6 Little Stints at Ferrybridge the best of the less frequents. Under an increasingly overcast sky overhead passage was limited to a steady trickle of Swallows but nothing else in quantity. The sea provided numbers both before and after the wind picked up, with c700 Kittiwakes, c100 auks, 26 Sandwich Terns, 21 Balearic Shearwaters and 5 Arctic Skuas among the totals from the Bill.