Sylvia Clive!

A cracking day for weather and okay for birds! The rarest bird wasn't nailed - a pre-breakfast report of the PG Tips couldn't be confirmed.........or was it the Nightingale at the Mast, which I didn't get up to see and now wish I had as the lone photograph seems to show an obvious grey supercilium!

The Buff-bellied Pipit at North Light seems to be getting tamer, meaning the boys with the big lenses have managed to get some absolute pin-sharp frame fillers! The Buff-breasted Sand still dances between the bull's feet at Barkland. A first-winter Glaucous Gull yesterday was the first of the autumn and was the rarest new arrival of the day. Today however, a scattering of new-in Garden Warblers gave us hope that something rarer may arrive but it wasn't until the evening that I came across a nice Subalpine Warbler in the Leogh roses and at the same time Simon reported a Hen Harrier past Pund, then another half an hour later at Gilsetter.

Most of my day yesterday was spent chasing and man-handling sheep! It was the big hill caa, to remove the lambs and count the ewes. By the end of the day I had fifteen lambs - eight for the pot and seven for replacements next year, half of which had escaped by the evening as we hadn't got round to mending the fence! Ooops! This morning we (myself, Hollie, Mum, Dad, Fyn, Raven, Ythan & Lubo) set out to recapture the escapees, an operation that was very successful except that there was still one missing! I heard a lamb with a purple spot on its rump (our mark) had been seen near Setter so we motored up there to retrieve it but all we found was one with a big orange splodge on its back - a breakout from Schoolton, so we caught it, tied it up, bundled it into the boot of the car and returned it to its croft. It had escaped again by the afternoon! We patched up our fence, so hopefully ours will stay put and the other one will turn up somewhere! Our hill ewe quota was very low but hopefully will increase on the next gather in a fortnight!