Friday 2 November 2018

Scillies - Day 5 - Rustic Bunting on St Marys

Rustic Bunting (Scott Reid)
Rustic Bunting (Scott Reid)
Rustic twitch in the pine belt
Serin (Scott Reid)
Serin (Scott Red)
Early arrival, early success
In the bag selfie
Brambling
Stunning fauna
Squire perched high
The Skipper
Jam & Cream the way to go
Plenty of visitors
More fauna
End of another busy day
Just when we thought the rarities had ended for the week, news broke late the previous evening of a Rustic Bunting up at Longstone.

Access sounded very difficult as the bird was on private land with roaming cows & an owner also had a gun ! We marched up and met the finder Will who explained where viewing was possible. Just that moment a Serin flew straight past us at height calling. A great start to the day.

We opted to try and get a spot from within the pine belt to view the field in which the Chaffinch flock which it was associating with were feeding. The field dropped away from us so you couldn’t actually see the birds on the ground. We all kept working our way through the flock each time they returned to the elms. Suddenly one of the birders we see regularly had the bird in her scope and shouted us to see if we wanted to come and view it. We were like Colin Jackson over the high hurdles but over trees to reach her to get our first view. Next job was to get it in our own scopes to get pro-longed views.

This took about ten minutes when the Squire found this beauty and the extra magnification of his scope granted us amazing views. This stunner was Reed Bunting in size but had white wing bars, pink beak and was certainly more reddish. The bird had probably travelled from north Europe and breeds in swampy forests in south east Asia.

We also record two Brambling in the morning and then found a group of three when we returned late afternoon.


The rest of the day we plotted our way up the Telegraph Road only adding a few Fieldfare before hitting the coastal path where we added a Red-throated Diver, Razorbill, Guillemots, GBBC, a Greenshank, 2 Grey Heron and few Stonechat.

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