Persistence pays off

So, what did you do on the 8th of October in Shetland in a perfect south-easterly? Um, I took some nice photos of a Twite, a couple of Shags and a Turnstone:

In between taking photos of common birds we thrashed around the crops at Toab and saw a Yellow-browed Warbler and not much else, then went down to the Sumburgh area. I read recently on a blog that shall be nameless that there are '160 observers scouring every nook and cranny of Shetland' at the moment. Well if there are that many people here I haven't seen them - there were precisely three of us scouring the entire area between Grutness and Sumburgh Head this afternoon. Maybe the other 157 were all off twitching all the rare birds which turned up all over the place today and gave us the motivation to carry on, even though we hadn't seen much other than lots of Goldcrests.

After several laps of the farm, we walked down the 'White's Thrush ditch' towards the hotel, and stumbled upon a nice Pallas's Warbler feeding behind a wall with two Yellow-broweds, two Chiffchaffs and two Spotted Flycatchers. Didn't manage to get any keepable photos of it though because, as has been noted before, I can't take photos of rare birds.

After this we went up to the lighthouse, where, apart from lots more Goldcrests, we didn't see a lot apart from this newly-arrived Short-eared Owl:

The weather looks even better tomorrow, so we'll probably do it all again, although I suspect that being a Saturday there will be a few more people around.