This weekend..
all about Visible Migration  at Ferryhills and one species that has a very unique status at this site...

While it is pretty early in the autumn for most species to be moving in any number, my visits last year showed that Tree Pipit passage peaked in the first half of August. So with decent calm conditions forecast hopes were high for some good passage Sat/Sun, but I wasn't prepared for how good it turned out to be.
On Sat Ferryhills was almost like a mini bird observatory with Clive and his ringing team of Rob and Anne, while carrying out the vis mig counts with me was only one of the original pioneers of Vis Mig-Keith Clarkson.

It took us a while to sus how to count the birds on Sat as many were being lured in by the tapes playing as part of the ringing operation  rather than moving straight through, but by standing on the opposite side of the hill away from ringing area and scanning towards the S/SW we found that birds would eventually lift off and could be followed as they gained height and departed across the Forth.
We also realised that there were plenty of birds moving over at height unaffected by the tapes; at one point Keith was following a flock of 4 that gained height and then joined another flock of birds which was at least 15 strong.
Anyway to cut a long story short the record British day count (held by Ferryhills from last autumn) was smashed with an amazing 275 birds over between 0615-1043!

Clive and co trapped 43 Tree Pips-very impressive total against the annual totals ringed in the UK.

Sunday saw Keith and Clive join me again, this time it was just pure vis mig counting with no ringing operations, so no tapes. Although not as high as the day before, another exceptional total of 209 birds went through between 0605-1000.

Some nice warm sunny weather on Sat afternoon and a very good variety of butterflies for our little suburban back garden with Small Tort, Red Admiral, Peacock , Large and Small White which can be put down to our Buddleia bushes which are well established now.