In September in the UK, rare birds often come from the west, swept over the Atlantic from North America on the tail end of tropical storms and the fast-flowing jet stream. But from the end of that month and well into October, birders look eastwards, hoping for visitors from Siberia. These have usually taken a wrong turn on their own migratory journey and have been brought across the North Sea on easterly winds.
Hotspots include Fair Isle and Shetland, off the northern coast of mainland Scotland, and the more accessible (for most of us) coastal headlands of Yorkshire. This autumn, as the Birdguides website reveals, both have produced the goods.
Shetland has recorded a Pechora pipit (named after a Russian river) and lanceolated and Pallas’s grasshopper warblers. Not to be outdone, Yorkshire had a pale-legged leaf warbler, found at the RSPB’s Bempton Cliffs reserve. This breeds in eastern China and North Korea and winters in the Malay peninsula, so it was well off course. Indeed, apart from a freshly dead bird on the Isles of Scilly in October 2016, this is the first live record of the bird not just in Britain but in the whole of the western Palearctic (Europe, north Africa and the Middle East).
Dozens of yellow-browed warblers have also turned up along the east coast, with some reaching inland sites. Once a rarity, these birds have now changed their migratory route and pass through Britain on their way south and west, probably wintering in Spain and north Africa.
