Secret Shetland
Chris Turner and Michael McKee’s strategy of focusing on the underwatched islands of Foula and Out Skerries has resulted in them locating an impressive list of rare and scarce birds in the archipelago over the years.
There is a certain masochistic pleasure about being a reservoir birder in the south-east of England. You know you are unlikely to see anything much, but you still head out each morning in the hope that today might be different. When we were scrawny students – what seems like a lifetime ago now – we felt we needed something more. A chance, as Brando nearly put it, ‘to be contenders’.
Roll on 30 years and today we may be older and a little wiser, but we’ve been very fortunate to have spent two or three of the peak autumn weeks birding in Shetland almost every year. It has been exhausting, frustrating and exhilarating. A plan was formulated to seek out underwatched potential hot-spots, and since 1993 we have headed north each autumn to try our luck. If one looks at a map of Shetland, other than the well-watched Fair Isle there are perhaps just two remote islands that are compact enough for a small crew of birders to cover on foot – Foula and Out Skerries. So we tried Foula in the early years, then Skerries, and then back to Foula again. While in the early 1990s there was occasional news from Out Skerries,
Foula was very much off the radar. Despite being on the ‘wrong’ side of Shetland, it was so remote that we thought it must be getting some good birds. So we decided that’s where we would start. We have been joined by some similarly minded friends, and special mention must go to Trevor Warwick, Pete Forrest and Marek Walford – three good mates and the sharpest of birders who have also spent more autumns than is healthy working the walls, ditches and iris beds with us looking for ‘that’ Locustella.
First to Foula
Foula is starkly beautiful – an island dominated by the 418-m peak of Da Sneug. This drops down to the sea, forming the second-highest sea cliffs in Britain. While the views from the hills are breathtaking, they offer little in the way of birding. Most of the best habitat is in the lower-lying and less-exposed eastern side of the island, including: the stone walls (dykes) and marshy area in and around Ristie in the north; the ruined crofts and extensive iris beds of Harrier; the iris beds, gardens and fields of Ham; and the cultivated fields, crofts and network of ditches to the south at Hametoun.
It would be remiss not to mention Geoff and Donna Atherton here. Moving to Foula some years ago, they show how dedicated gardeners can create a stunning habitat from scratch. Geoff and Donna’s croft at Ham has
hosted an enviable list of rare and scare birds, and the self-found list of these extraordinary birders must be one of the most impressive in the country. It includes American Yellow Warbler, Black-faced Bunting, White-throated Sparrow and Siberian Rubythroat in the last few autumns alone.
While it is no secret that ‘the big one may travel alone’, a successful trip is normally dependent on favourable weather conditions; and for Shetland that usually means winds from the south-east. Foula is no different and we were very fortunate in having a couple of good years early on, each with at least one period of continental airflow. Our first Lanceolated Warbler in 1994 was an excellent find at Harrier, and at the time it was one of just a handful seen away from Fair Isle. A Lesser Grey Shrike five days later in the garden of Burns Cottage remains a good Shetland bird. We had four Pechora Pipits in consecutive years in Ham – again a very rare bird away from Fair
Isle – and the Yellow-breasted Bunting along the Soberlie dyke definitely got the blood pumping, even if it didn’t have the status then that it does now. Although we switched our allegiance to the relative comfort of Out Skerries in 2000, it was these early successes on Foula that gave us the taste for birding the Northern Isles. And it was these classic conditions in 2020 which gave us one of our more memorable Foula afternoons a couple of years after our return. We’d had a steady start to the trip with a good spread of common migrants to keep us honest. Then on 1 October the promised south-easterlies arrived. After an oddly quiet morning, we headed out after lunch into the increasingly heavy dreich to check the southern part of the island. Walking along the burn running down from Hametoun, we flushed a large, dark and very wet Locustella. Suspecting that it was a Pallas’s Grasshopper Warbler it took a little more encouragement for the bird to perch out in the open for a few seconds to confirm its identification. Still buzzing, we started to criss-cross the system of ditches and grassy banks in continuous rain to see what else we could dig out, and 20 minutes later and 200 yards to the south we flushed a Lanceolated Warbler. That year’s excellent haul included a supporting cast
of Woodchat Shrike, 30 or so Yellowbrowed Warblers, Radde’s Warbler, Bluethroat, Red-breasted Flycatcher, four Olive-backed Pipits and three Hornemann’s Arctic Redpolls.
Westerlies for waifs
South-easterlies may bring in the numbers, but Foula is special in that birds also seem to turn up when there is west in the wind. The 1993 Rustic Bunting was found in a light northwesterly, the 1994 Lesser Grey Shrike in a south-westerly and the 1995 Pechora in a west-south-west.
While it wouldn’t be correct to suggest that we have ever longed for a series of westerly depressions, a south-westerly blow does have the potential to bring in something really worthwhile. Although not having the pedigree of Barra or St Agnes, Foula has an excellent and ever-growing list of American passerines under its belt. We played a small part in adding to these records in our first year returning to Foula in 2018.
The weather had been relentless, with winds from the west for the entire trip. We had laced on our still-wet boots to start our daily round of the more sheltered parts of the island when, making our way up the hill from Ristie, Michael glimpsed a wader buffeting in the wind that appeared to land in a puddle by a nearby planticrub. Feeling obliged to check to see if it was a wind-blown phalarope we were ecstatic when an American sparrow popped up in front of us on the low wall of a ruined croft. The language was a little colourful when we realised that this was a first-winter White-crowned Sparrow, and not ‘merely’ the White-throated Sparrow that had been found by Donna and taken up residence in the ruined croft not far away at Harrier three weeks before. Remarkably this was the second consecutive year a White-crowned Sparrow had been found on Foula, with a first-winter bird in Ham in 2017.
Foula was used as a stand-in for St Kilda in Michael Powell’s 1937 film
The Island at the End of the World. This title often seemed apt, particularly after we had been consigned to our digs for five days by continuous force-8 northwesterlies. So in 2000, and tempted by its tag line ‘The Friendly Isles’, we thought we would see what birding on Out Skerries might offer.
Out Skerries
Skerries is a very different kettle of fish to Foula. It is sheltered from the extremes of the weather by Mainland Shetland to the west. It has an excellent, reliable ferry service, which is less affected by weather than the two-hour ordeal from Walls to Foula. And while only called upon in extremis, it does offer the opportunity for a twitch (and who could blame us for twitching off for the 2014 Siberian Rubythroat and 2016 Siberian Accentor). Skerries also has two shops – perhaps unexpected given its tiny population – and this offers another advantage over Foula, where you have to bring every tea bag, pint of milk and Jaffa Cake on with you.
Out Skerries is made up of three main islands, only two of which are inhabited – Housay and Bruray. These are linked by a short road bridge and a day’s birding consists of checking and doublechecking the gardens, ditches, rough fields and iris patches on both islands. While we have found that birds can and do turn up almost anywhere, there are two notable hot-spots on the islands: the Bruray pool and its surrounding ditches, and the ‘Valley of Dreams’ on Housay. This is more prosaically a shallow valley bounded by stone walls and fed by a small stream and a couple of septic-tank overflows. Importantly, it also contains the largest iris bed on the islands. If you walk this valley and see little you know you might be destined for a day
watching re-runs of Frasier. However, if ‘the Sender’ has been generous, it is a valley that will be walked multiple times in a day, and it is the part of the island where we have enjoyed many of our best finds.
Drift days
Skerries excels on those classic ‘drifty’ days – days with light south-easterly winds and perhaps a little rain. It is these that deliver the falls of common migrants. Birds will be visible from first thing in the key habitats, but if the conditions are ideal more birds will drop in throughout the day, with the witching hour being between 10 am and 11 am. These are also the days that are most likely to turn up the sought-after Shetland skulkers. By walking every wall and every ditch and criss-crossing every iris patch we have been fortunate to turn up six Lanceolated Warblers and two Pallas’s Grasshopper Warblers on Skerries alone.
Most of the best birding areas on Skerries are exposed, so when the winds pick up birding can be really hard going. On these occasions an understanding of the sheltered spots can pay off. On 8 October 2009, a force 8 north-north-westerly and showers made birding very difficult. With very little to show for our efforts, a visit to one of the few south-facing geos on the islands produced two Hornemann’s Arctic Redpolls. Similarly, when on 27 September 2016 a force 5 south-southeasterly veered round to the south-west and increased to force 9, a check of the small easternmost geo on Bruray produced a first-winter Brown Shrike.
The rarest finds
There have been many memorable days on Skerries. The bird matters, but the circumstances of the find are also important. An obvious highlight should be coming across Britain’s first bona fide Red-headed Bunting, which dropped out of the sky in front of us on 2 October 2010 as we were walking up the iris valley on Housay. While clearly the rarest bird we could ever hope to find, the memories are tempered (to put it mildly) by the fact that we called it (and had it accepted) as a Black-headed Bunting. Its true identity was only established 13 years later as part of a European-wide review carried out by the Norwegian rarities committee. Not quite the scenario in our minds when we sat in a pub 30 years ago making our plans and fantasising about finding that mythical ‘first for Britain’.
Britain’s third accepted Eastern Yellow Wagtail at the pool on Bruray in 2011 was a great find. The October 2016 Black-throated Thrush was particularly satisfying and a reward for the many weeks of checking every thrush, ‘just in case’. Michael’s Isabelline Wheatear on Housay in 2019 was also a memorable bird, especially given that we had just had two fairly quiet weeks on Foula. Michael and Marek particularly enjoyed scoring a Lanceolated Warbler by the airstrip within 20 minutes of arriving on Skerries in 2012 and then stumbling across a Pechora Pipit by the graveyard straight after lunch.
There are two birds that really stand
out, though – one from the east and one from the west. It was 2000 that gave us our first really big bird, and the realisation that our first year on Skerries wouldn’t be our last. On 20 September a strong south-easterly had been forecast, and unlike so many positive forecasts that came to nothing, it was a south-easterly gale that we got. The following morning the wind had veered south-west and the birding had been a little disappointing, with some common migrants but nothing particularly unusual, when we heard a ‘bunting’ giving a windblown link-link-link call. We were baffled as this just didn’t seem to fit any of the eastern possibilities.
Still trying to relocate the bird, the ID fell into place. Surely it had to be a Bobolink? Sure enough, this proved to be the case when it was pinned down a few minutes later. It was a stunning bird that spent the rest of the day devouring seed heads in a grassy field just up from the iris valley.
And the bird from the east? It’s not the rarest, and certainly not the trickiest identification conundrum, but for the authors, and likely for many birders rolling the dice on an autumn birding trip, it’s an iconic bird. We’d had an excellent morning enjoying good numbers of common migrants and a couple of scarcities, and had just found our second ‘Eastern Stonechat’ in two days. As we walked back to our digs on Housay, enthusing about our morning and looking forward to a cup of tea, suddenly a large thrush flew up from the ground by a fence-line ahead. We all lifted our bins to see this goldenspangled beauty flying along the hillside and the three of us in unison shouted: “White’s Thrush!” It banked, showing its zigzag underwing pattern, before disappearing over the brow of the hill never to be seen again. Unforgettable!
The future
Those sitting at home and scrolling through the BirdGuides app could be forgiven for thinking that finding decent birds on a sparsely vegetated island such as Foula or Out Skerries is as easy as shooting fish in a barrel. Yes, in the right conditions there are good birds to be found, but on many days, and sometimes weeks, we have had very little to show for our efforts. There have been evenings when we’ve returned exhausted to our digs after walking over 20 km asking ourselves: “Why do we keep doing this?” We have been fortunate to have done well since our first trip in 1993. Other birders have enjoyed some of our finds, and we have appreciated birds found by others, but we have still never scored that huge rare – the bird which makes the autumn birding headlines. And until we do, although the hills seem steeper and the wind keener, we suspect we will keep coming back. ■