There have been plenty of birds migrating over night in the last few nights, mostly Redwing. However there were two great examples of what can sneak over your house during the course of the night whilst your tucked up in bed. One was this early this morning when a Hawfinch was sound recorded over an Oakdale garden at 05:36 this morning. The second was a night migrating Yellow-browed Warbler sound recorded over one of our teams gardens in Lytchett Matravers at 07:37 yesterday morning. The recordings and accompanying sonagrams can be found below. The Hawfinch recording is a perfect series of flight calls which they regularly do whilst migrating at night, with the sonagram providing a visual representation of that call. The Yellow-browed Warbler is harder to hear, but starts at 4.5 seconds into the recording. The sonagram for this call helped clinch the ID and again, is the typical contact call of this species. Both are considered scarce autumn migrants in Dorset and are hard enough to find during the day, so to have them flying over peoples gardens in the dead of night just goes to show that not only should we be looking, but constantly listening too (and never go to bed).

Elsewhere (during daylight hours), the Brownsea Lagoon was still busy on the high tides and held 65 Spoonbill, 401 Avocet, 11 Bar-tailed Godwit, 17 Greenshank and the autumns first Black Redstart was son Brownsea Quay. A Short-eared Owl was in the Wareham Channel this evening, Keysworth side, and female White-tailed Eagle G466 was in Brands Bay this afternoon. A Goshawk was perched up in a tree at Middlebere and an Osprey was also in Middlebere which was apparently Scottish male 511 who is amazingly still around since arriving a few weeks ago. This is the male that was also around last autumn and didn’t leave until October 28th, so he may stick around for another week or so yet. There were singles of  Spotted Redshank in Lytchett Bay and on the Brownsea Lagoon with a minimum of 5 Marsh Harrier in the harbour. A Golden Plover was on Shell Bay Beach, Studland this AM along with 7 Sanderling.

Hawfinch – Call of night time migrant, Oakdale – 18/10/24 @ 05:36 – David Foster

Yellow-browed Warbler – Call of night time migrant, Lytchett Matravers – 17/10/24 @ 03:37 – Paul Morton

Golden Plover – Shell Bay Beach – David Foster