Graham's Birding Blog: The Scilly Season starts


The Scillonian III from Bar Point, St. Mary's with a Grey Seal pup in the foreground

After watching the England u21 football team beat Rumania 2-1 at Carrow Road, Mark Golley and I set out on Friday night for Land's End, to catch our flight to the Isles of Scilly. The journey was quite eventful, finding a freshly-dead Otter lying in the middle of the A303 (at about 3am) and then having great views of a Badger feeding on the side of the road just before the M5. The badger was feeding on a grass verge on the side of the A30 and wasn't overly fussed about our presence.
We arrived at Land's End at just after 5am and set about getting a few hours kip in the car before having a full-English and then catching our 9.50 flight over to St. Mary's. We checked into our apartment and started to unpack, but after only 10 minutes in the house the Mega-alert was sounding with the message "MEGA Black-eared Wheatear, Isles of Scilly, St. Mary's at Star Castle". We were off!
We headed up to the Garrison to find 50 or so birders milling around aimlessly. The bird had flown off and nobody had managed to relocate it. I took the opportunity to catch up with a few birders I'd not seen for a while (Ian Lewington, Dick Filby, Will Wagstaff and a few others), but not long later the bird was relocated on the rocks at the bottom of the King Charles battery. It fed on the cliff sides and on the big boulders below. Judging by the lovely buffy tones of this bird it is certainly a Western Black-eared Wheatear.
After doing our groceries shopping, Mark and I grabbed a pasty from the Kavorna and caught the bus up to MacFarland Downs. At this point I feel that I should mention something about the amount of birders on the island. There was about 100 people at the wheatear, plus I guess there might be quite a few people on the off-island, but it appears that although 100 people could make it to see a rare wheatear, hardly any of them could actually make it out birding. Mark and I walked the whole length of the island this afternoon (Bar Point to The Garrison) and only saw about 10 people out birding, so it appears that there are hardly any birders on the island at all. This is good in one way – if there's something cripplingly rare out there, perhaps we'll have a chance of finding it, but the downside of this is that if we, or a handful of other birders don't find it, it could be quite a rare-free week.
Anyway, we headed across MacFarland Downs, across to the bulb dump, down to the shore, along to Bar Point and then back to Hugh Town via Porthloo. The best bird we saw was only a Pied Flycatcher, but a few Spotted Flycatchers, Common Sandpiper and a few Northern Wheatears broke up the afternoon.
There was also a nice seal pup hauled up on a boat launch near Bar Point which lay still long enough to get it in frame with the Scillonian Ferry in the background.

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