Still Dire

Still very quiet around the patch - 4 Barnacle Geese on the 7th, 1-2 1st winter Glaucs on most days, a monstrous northern (north-eastern?) Herring Gull on the 10th (approaching Greylag Goose in size!!!!) and a Skylark on the 12th.

Barnacle Geese

Herring Gull

GWT

2 Glaucs on the patch today and still quite a few Gulls feeding off Moast Beach and, in the last few minutes of daylight, a drake Green-winged Teal at the back of the Loch. 6 Twite were in a neighbour's garden.

Glaucous Gulls

Common Gulls

Herring Gulls

Twite

The Whacky World of Herring Gulls

With an hour or two to kill in Lerwick, I had a quick look through the 40 or so Gulls on Victoria Pier - mostly Herring Gulls with the odd Greater Black coming and going. Of the 15 or so 1w Herrings present at least 5 were really frosty 1w Argentatus types plus a 2w Argentatus type and one really tiny 1w Argenteus type bird.

Various 1w 'frosties'

2w 'frosty'

Small and petite 1w 'argenteus' type

Mr Piggy Eyes

Not a reference to the fascist cockwomble Mr Trump, but to the 1w Glaucous Gull that is still around Scatness. Cheap bread from Tesco again last night, so another Gull feeding session at Moast Beach, as well as the Glauc, there was a 1w Iceland Gull coming and going, a rather dark 1w Herring Gull (presumably one of the dark things that occur on Iceland) and a 2w Lesser Black-backed - I can't recall ever seeing a second year LBBG on Shetland, I have seen the occasional 1w bird in winter before and 'not quite adult' birds in the summer, so this bird coming in was totally unexpected.

Glaucous Gull

2w Herring Gull

Near adult Herring Gull

Dark 1w Herring Gull

Iceland Gull

Lesser Black-backed Gull

Gullistan

There has been a few thousand Gulls around Scatness over the last few days, on the 25th I picked out a 2w Kumlien's and an adult Iceland in front of the house. And with Tesco selling their near date bread off last night at 20p a loaf, today was going to be spent gulling. Most of the Gulls were on the leeward side of Lady's Holm, so I dumped 10 loaves of bread into the sea at Moast Beach, and it didn't take too long for about a thousand of them to come in feeding. Amongst them a 1w Glaucous and 2 Iceland Gulls (1w and 2w) and a rather pale 1w Herring Gull.
A bit of a surprise was a Goldfinch briefly in the garden, presumably one of the birds from last autumn still hanging about.

Glaucous Gull

Iceland Gull

Pale Herring Gull

Gulls

Back out on the patch today, and there are now 3 Common Scoters with the Velvet Scoter in West Voe, plus a fly-by Merlin there. On the Scatness peninsula there was just 6 Golden Plover and a Meadow Pipit. Moast Beach was heaving with Gulls (by Scatness standards anyway) with about 300 Gulls feeding among the waves, in which were 4 Black-headed Gulls (including a pink hued bird), a rather heavily shawled Herring Gull and a rather interesting long winged, dark Herring Gull. Both Red-throated and Great Northern Divers were in Quendale Bay.

Merlin

Pink hued Black-headed Gull

Common Scoters with Velvet Scoter

Golden Plovers

Hooded Crow (taken with trail cam)

Heavily shawled Herring Gull

Long winged, dark Herring Gull

Red-throated Diver

The coastguard on a bird scaring exercise in West Voe