Goose Melange

It's felt pretty autumnul the last couple of days. Sunday started warm and sunny, but gradually a breeze took over, and the week so far has probably been ten degrees cooler than recently. It's brought about a change in the birds as well, most of the migrants have disappeared, and there have been few new arrivals. Having been so amazing lately, it's seemed completely dead the last couple of mornings. Perhaps though it's the start of a change, and we'll soon get the big hirdundine days, the big Woodpigeon days, and Meadow Pipits piling through.

I wandered around for an hour and a half this morning and saw very little. Of note were 28 species of goose on the Flats, which was fairly impressive, though 25 of these were contained within just two birds....

My journey to work was brought to a halt by news of a person under a train somewhere - so selfish -  and so I retraced my steps to the bus and onwards to the concrete jungle, where Canada Geese would have been pretty exciting. The best I could manage was a Black-headed Gull that posed for the camera and so allowed for some boring testing of teleconverters with the 300mm lens I recently reclaimed. I'll spare you the detail here (it's here), suffice it to say that I think it's definitely a viable combination, and that I think that this is going to be the go for Shetland.