The last day in Shetland - 24/9/2021

Where would a blog about Shetland be without a photo of a pony 

And so it comes to an end, my holiday was all too brief, and now I write the last post of my time in Shetland. Typing this up in October it now seems so long ago, yet only three weeks have passed since I was last there. It seems unreal, like a part of my life separate from everything else, not sharing the same timeline as the rest of my life. 

SANDERLING, the wader of sandy beaches

Today was one of the better days, with a few decent sightings, although nothing particularly unusual. Today we really didn't have any plan, and travelled to a lot of places we visited previously, but with little to show for them. It was frustrating to visit these sites again and again with nothing really to see at any of them. Most of these sites I have written about on previous posts, so today there's not much more to write about. We spent eight hours a day looking for birds, and as you can see from the briefness of this blog, we didn't really have anything of note to see.

Spiggie Beach

From the place we stayed in for the last four nights of this holiday in Shetland, the Sumburgh Hotel, there was a short walk down to the sea. Here a rocky shoreline held the sea at bay. Every morning, before breakfast we would walk down to take a look and see what was around, and it was the usual fare, the kind of birds seen around the island. One member of the party kept seeing a PURPLE SANDPIPER, which he would prove by taking a picture to show he wasn't fibbing. Every morning everyone else would look for the bird with no luck and we wondered what we had to do to see the bird. So today the whole group went down to have a look and finally! we got to see not just one bird but three. A good total, but this was a bird I was expecting to see a lot of on this trip.

Three WHOOPER SWANS, Scatness, those big yellow and black bills differentiate them from our mutes

The only new place that had anything of note was Quendale Bay, a bit further on from Quendale, where we saw the first red breasted flycatcher. From the elevated land we had decent views of the bay. Best birds were the three or so GREAT NORTHERN DIVERS, massive and distinctive birds, but again a species we should have seen more of on the holiday, this area of the world should have held more of this bird. Also present were three female COMMON SCOTER, distant views on the sea, which again are not particularly much of note, you can see thousands off the coast of Titchwell, but they were a holiday tick I guess.

Jarlshof is an ancient settlement right next to our hotel, I would go visit in the morning. The central building is the lord's manor, whilst the commoner people would live in smaller settlements spread around.

This is the last post about my holiday in Shetland and its a shame really as now it feels like its finally over. As you can probably work out, I was fairly disappointed with the trip, just because there were no birds about. I felt at times that we could have visited more places, maybe explore some sites in more detail and it felt that there must have been birds out there if we really looked for them. This was my one opportunity to visit Shetland, so far in my life and I just felt a little underwhelmed by  it all, really. Like so many things in life, bird migration is a lottery, nothing can predict it, but I didn't expect to see it at its most inactive.