Monday, March 19, 2018
A crisp cold day with blue skies and sunshine called me out to Achnahaird in a not-very-hopeful quest for my first wheatear of the year. Walking out across the clifftops to the sand dunes, I flushed two snipe from a ditch; and in the fields behind the houses I saw curlews, golden plovers, and lapwings.
On a muddy drainage line down towards the saltmarsh, where a couple of rock pipits and a pied wagtail were feeding, a bird ran ahead of me which had me stumped. To begin with I could only see it from the back, but then caught a glimpse of its face and knew it was a bunting.
I leaned against a sand bank and clicked off some shots looking into the sun. All the birds took off at one point, flew over me, and then came back; and among the sharp calls of the pipits, a hard trill rang out. This was exciting; I hadn't heard this call before, and I knew it wasn't a reed bunting. One of the pipits then chased the bird. It flew up into the dunes where it sat for a couple of minutes in full view - my first ever Lapland bunting.
But I'll have to wait a bit longer for the first wheatear of the year.