A 'Little' Better

Various forms of substance abuse last night not surprisingly led to a sore head this morning. However, even in my still semi inebriated state, and before I'd put my contact lenses in, I managed to find a Yellow-browed Warbler in Rob's front garden. Amazingly, given that it's usually the commonest warbler here in October, this was a house tick for him.

This seemed a good sign, so after a hearty bird-finding breakfast we headed down south. There seemed to be more birds around today, but we didn't see anything of note until about midday. As we were driving up to the lighthouse this Little Bunting appeared on the road in front of us. Rob managed not to run it over, and we got some photos before it flew off down the road and disappeared over the cliff (it was seen again later).

Fucking typical - you walk miles all over South Mainland seeing nothing, and then a good bird appears in the road in front of you! Perhaps the way forward is not all this Punkbirder-style route marching, but just staying in the car?

News of a White's Thrush on Fair Isle encouraged us to keep going, but despite thrashing the whole of the Sumburgh area we couldn't find anything else (the Nordagerdi crew found a Siberian Stonechat after we'd left, which showed that new birds were still arriving in the afternoon). Geosetter was dead, and another Yellow-browed at Channerwick was the only other vaguely interesting bird we saw.