A quick look round the garden and willows first thing produced nothing more than a couple of Garden Warblers.

Assuming there was nothing much to be seen, I retreated indoors for some breakfast. Whilst eating my egg and bacon I noticed a female Bluethroat sitting on the fence outside my window! Overcome with joy and excitement I went outside to have a proper look, only to hear the distinctive song of a Bluethroat. Hang on, do females sing? No they don’t. Sitting on the top of a shrub was a male Bluethroat singing its pretty little head off. Gosh. A pair of Bluethroats… needless to say, I went for the camera, the Bluethroats both vanished into cover and I never saw them again.

Up at Sumburgh Head during the morning I was enveloped in thick fog and all that I could see was a female Pied Flycatcher. Some silly bint from a newspaper then rang me trying to flog some advertising space; little did I know that whilst I was trying to politely tell her to bugger off and leave me alone, Steve was trying to ring me to tell me there was a Honey Buzzard circling over my house! By the time he got hold of me it had headed directly towards me at Sumburgh Head, so I ran out of the office to be confronted by a wall of fog. Tits and toss. Not only had I missed a house tick, I had also missed a Shetland tick (being a bit of a tart, I have never seen Honey Buzzard in Shetland).

Something I haven’t mentioned over the last few days has been my repeated failed attempts to see a Laughing Gull that has been visiting Boddam on and off since Sunday. Finally this evening, at the ninth time of asking, I saw it. And a bit of a corker it was too.