A Yellow browed Casualty in Scalloway Shetland 29th September

Our accommodation at Scalloway is a house at the top of a hill that overlooks the town with a garden surrounded by huge sycamores whose leaves still cling stubbornly but lifeless to the trees whilst others that have fallen congregate in drifts of withered brown at the back door, blown there by the wind that eddies around the house

This morning, leaving the back door, a tiny corpse lay in front of me underneath a ground floor window. It was a Yellow browed Warbler, possibly the one we had heard calling from the sycamores a day earlier.

I picked it up, its feathers sodden from a rain shower and left it to dry on a paper towel in my room. It was so poignant looking at its tiny form, hardly bigger than a Goldcrest  and realising what a vast distance it had travelled  and how perilous was its journey only to end prematurely by colliding with a window.

The sight of one of these world travellers flitting through the trees on Shetland always brings a thrill. Often its presence is revealed by its anxiety note, a loud tsweeet call.You look up into a sycamore struggling to detect a movement that is different to the constant flickering of leaves in the wind.You find the bird eventually and in the bins it is revealed as a tiny avian gem of moss green upperparts and yellow stripes above the eye and across its wings.Then it disappears into the leaves and becomes as one with them once more.

This autumn has seen many Yellow browed Warblers arrive in Shetland.For instance on the 2nd of October one hundred and thirty were counted in Shetland and there must have been many more that went unrecorded. It is no longer classed as even scarce but accepted as common by resident Shetland birders.

No one can be sure why part of the population of a species that normally heads southeast to southern Asia, from its breeding grounds in Siberia,  is now migrating northwest, in exactly the opposite direction and expanding its range into western Europe. 

The increase of records in Shetland correlates with those in Britain with around seventy being reported annually fifty years ago, rising to more than eight hundred in 2003, then up to two thousand in 2017 and shows no sign of stopping.Some years are better than others but the rise in numbers is inexorable, the birds seeming to arrive in waves.

An unprecedented five have so far been recorded this autumn in my home county of Oxfordshire too

Reflecting on the Yellow browed Warbler I kept the warbler theme going on a grey morning by heading to the outskirts of Lerwick and Clickimin Loch in particular which is bordered by a popular pathway much used by the public and visiting birders.The sides of the pathway are bordered by mainly birch and other species of small tree and attract many migrants. Who can forget the White's Thrush that resided here for a few days in 2002?

No such mega today though but a Barred Warbler was reported as showing well in the birches.This is a robust, bulky bird with a long tail, more like a small thrush than a warbler and can be very confiding.Invariably they are first year birds dressed in an overall plumage of pale grey with very little variation and are unmistakeable when seen.

I soon found the bird near the top of a small birch picking black aphids from the undersides of the birch's yellowing leaves.It had none of the finesse of a male Blackcap also feeding in the tree but ponderously moved from twig to twig as it examined the leaves.

Barred Warblers breed in southern Scandinavia eastwards through Russia to Siberia and normally winter in East Africa.They are not uncommon on Shetland at this time of year especially with the northeast winds that have been prevalent  for some days now

I had already seen four this autumn before this confiding bird but they are always nice to see especially when allowing such close views

to be continued

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