With dreary, anticyclonic conditions firmly established, diminishing returns are inevitably setting in. However, it's the middle of October so just about anything's possible and today's utterly out-of-the-blue arrivals were a party of 6 Stone Curlews that looked as though they'd just flown onto the island when they were first spotted over the north end; after settling for a while the flock broke up and although there were later sightings here and there - some even wandering as far south as the Bill - they proved tricky to pin down and didn't aggregate together again. Apart from this exceptional event, today was for the most part a lower-key repeat of the week so far, with the Red-backed Shrike and Wryneck remaining at the Bill and 8 Black Redstarts, 2 Dartford Warblers, a Cattle Egret, a Short-eared Owl and a Ring Ouzel amongst others providing further scarcity interest there. On the ground, Chiffchaffs returned to prominence including upwards of 100 at the Bill, with late-ish singles of Redstart, Garden Warbler and Whitethroat of note amongst the back-up migrants; overhead, the usual suspects were all represented in decent supply, with 2 Merlins over the Bill and a lone Crossbill over the north of the island the best of the oddities. The sea was again carpeted in auks including an absolute minimum of 5000 off the Bill, where 21 Dark-bellied Brent Geese, 6 Arctic Skuas, 3 Sooty Shearwaters, 2 Pale-bellied Brent Geese, 2 Wigeon and a Manx Shearwater also passed through.
We've had some pretty good birds this year but to some extent most have been things that weren't all that shocking - if you walk around the Crown Estate Field often enough you're eventually going to stumble across a Booted Warbler (...it'll be a Lanceolated Warbler next) and if you spend long enough staring at the sea you're eventually going to jam a Fea's Petrel - but for sheer unexpectedness we're not at all sure that anyone would have chalked a flock of 6 Stone Curlews on their card for today, so we can well imagine Dave Foot's shock when he spotted these birds overhead. They were a fine sight in the air...
In the same way that some birds are inevitably going to turn up if you keep looking, so there are a few moths that we've always thought would eventually turn up at Portland - the question was always whether we'd live long enough to bear witness. Although its home range is a rather restricted area of heathland between east Dorset and Sussex, the Southern Chestnut has had just about enough of a propensity to stray away from the furze to pique our interest since it was first discovered in Britain in the early 1990s; however, it's quite a subtle moth so Jodie did well to spot last night's sub-optimal specimen in the trap she looks after in the Obs garden. By the look of the distribution map, this must be vying with Paul Harris' record from his garden at Upwey as the furthest west the moth has been recorded in Britain © Martin Cade:
Ringing numbers dropping slightly each day in the prevailing samey conditions: 77 new birds at the Bill today with 31 Chiffchaffs putting them firmly back at the top of the numbers; otherwise, only Blackcap made double figures but late-ish singles of Redstart, Whitethroat and Garden Warbler of note.
— Portland Bird Observatory (@portlandbirdobs.bsky.social) October 15, 2025 at 10:07 PM
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