Papa Stour

It's late September and after months of build up a team including Steve Addinnal, Chris Bell, Tim Cleeves and Ken Shaw embarked on the ultimate self-finding mission to Papa Stour. Where? A small island just of the west mainland of Shetland. It promised much, and the time approached nearer, this was looking like 'it' - our greatest moment. Fair Isle had more sibes than you could shake a stick at, Foula kept hitting the jackpot and the mainland was weighing in on the action. The history book were about to be rewriiten - the islands only rare was back in 1972 - a Green-winged Teal. Crikey, things were really looking good - visions of what we were going to find never left my mind for hours - the excitement was intense. And we found.....

NOTHING

(and I didn't just do that for effect, we really did find nothing. Mind you, we only had 1.5 days on the island in the end - the rest of the week was spent on the mainland - so it was probably awash with bluetails and White's Thrushes on day we missed. Better luck next time. I would have liked to have inserted photos of all the rares we found below, but here's some a lovely landscape shot instead, and a nice map).