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17 October 2026 Shetland 2026

I recently returned from eight days wading through mires, peering over garden fences, traipsing through iris beds and squinting at sycamores - yep... Shetland again, with David Bradnum, Peter Moore and Will Soar. Unlike previous years, there was neither a huge find nor a decent mega to twitch - but we had great fun. The highlight was finding a Radde's Warbler (a scarce bird on Shetland: pictured) in an iris bed at the relatively rarely checked locality of Tangwick Has, on Eshaness on northwest Mainland. The biggest rarity was a Grey-cheeked Thrush, which we managed to see (and reidentify: it had been put out as "an American thrush, probably Swainson's"), in the last hour before boarding the ferry home. There was enough to keep us going at each of the 60(?) sites we checked across the week - all bar a couple of stops produced at least one migrant, though - other than the Radde's - we notched up nothing better than a couple of blythi Lesser Whitethroat, 3 Pied Flycatcher, 15 Yellow-browed Warblers and perhaps eight Siberian Chiffchaffs. We were 30 seconds too late to find an American Golden Plover: calling in at the Fleck flock of Goldies, where we had enjoyed a Buff-breasted Sandpiper earlier in the week, we were setting up our scopes as a message about the AGP there pinged from a birder standing 50m away.

We almost always resisted twitching in favour of bird-finding, not indulging in the PG Tips on Unst, for example, nor even trying for Lanceolated Warbler, Black-throated Thrush or Red-eyed Vireo. We did have a dawn stab at Black-faced Bunting, having been too far north to twitch it the previous evening, but to no avail. The only other species we went out of our way for was Arctic Warbler that friends Stu Butchart, Richard 'Stitch' Johnson and Kieran Allinson had found a day or two earlier. And we only went for that, I think, because only one of us (me!) had seen an Arctic Warbler at Gott that we called in on when returning home a few evenings previously. Anyway, here's that Arctic Warbler, plus a couple of other nice things bumped into.

Shetland was not all birds, of course. We enjoyed watching a number of Otters, including a family of four at Hillswick. Three Minke Whales fed close offshore on east Mainland one day. And I chanced upon two Haworth's Rustic nectaring one afternoon - which was just as well, as the moth trap at our digs produced nothing better than a Pearly Underwing.

The impressive finale to our trip was not an animal at all - but the Northern Lights that danced across the sky as we were heading south on the ferry, back to Aberdeen.

The rarest bird we saw was actually on the way north to Shetland, when we called in on the Eastern Bonelli's Warbler at Gibraltar Point (Lincs). Roughly the tenth record in the UK, this was a tick for three of us. The extensive white on the tertials, mantle colour, dark lores and bolder face pattern were indicative of Eastern, even without it calling (which it had apparently done the night before). This was the start of what was very much a 'warbler week'.