Large fall of wheatear on St Mary's

On the 7th September, well over 600 Wheatear arrived on St Mary's after heavy overnight rain, including a record number of 400+ on the airfield! Other birds included 100+Giants Castle, 50+peninnis, 40+Woolpack area, Garrison and 25+Telegraph with other birds scattered around the island and no one did the golf course.

 

 

The following day, 2 juvenile Buff-breasted sandpiper turned up on the airfield. Most of the Wheatear had departed overnight, leaving only 50+ on the airfield.

 

While trying to relocate the Buff sands after they had gone missing, I stumbled across this Lapland Bunting on the golf course. The only other bird of note that I've seen is the Icterine Warbler that Tony and Ritchie found on the Garrison

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Willow Warbler, Chiffchaff, Spotted Flycatcher and Swallows at the Garrison

 

Juvenile Goldfinches 

 

Kingfisher at Porth Hellick in the evening light

 

Elle strangling a Manx Shearwater that we were just about to release off Deep Point. The bird was picked up at the harbour and given to me by Mad Max Rowe.

Thumbs up as we watched it fly off strongly out to sea

 

Sunset from Peninnis

 

I loved this man's music. The lagend, JJ Cale, died of a heart attack on 27th July aged 74. Here he is having a chat with Jools Holland and singing  Cocaine, made famous by Eric Clapton.
Singer and songwriter, whose work became hits for a wide range of other artists including Eric Clapton and Lynyrd Skynyrd. 
Known for a relaxed blues style mixed with folk and jazz, Cale got his start playing in honky-tonks in Tulsa, Oklahoma, before joining the Grand Ole Opry road company. In 1964, he moved to Los Angeles, where he worked as a recording engineer for Leon Russell and Snuff Garrett. He recorded his first single for Liberty Records in 1965, with "After Midnight" as the B-side. Cale won a Grammy for his 2006 collaboration with Eric Clapton,
The Road to Escondido. Over a career that spans more than a dozen albums of his own, beginning with Naturally in 1972, Cale cultivated a quiet anonymity, doing few interviews, rarely performing live, and keeping his picture off his album covers in the first decade and a half of his career.
"I'm a background person," Cale told the Chicago Sun Times in 1990. "I'm not a household name. People have heard my music, but all my famous songs were made famous by somebody else. . . . But that was my goal."
In spite of the low profile, Cale continued to exert an influence on subsequent generations of musicians. "The effortlessness, that restraint and underplaying, under-singing – it was just very powerful," Beck told the Los Angeles Times in 2009. "The power of doing less and holding back in a song, I've taken a lot of influence from that."