Stephen Rutt
SOG Exile on North Ronaldsay pt. 2
The Lapland Bunting stayed with us for a while and had the ignominy of being outclassed each day by a rarer or prettier arrival. On the 2nd I came upon a female Dotterel hiding in a hummock. We both stared at each other in shock. Mark said that it was so late it really should’ve been a Caspian Plover. On the 3rd we had the absolute pleasure of a singing Bluethroat — radiant blue and brick red — in brilliant sunshine, again treating the stone walls like hedgerows and gorging on the hatching insects.
It was after the Lapland Bunting left that I got a first taste of a spring fall. It had rained and blown an easterly all morning on the 5th, the hallowed weather that had avoided all us spring. I walked every wall in the morning and found only a few Lesser Whitethroats before my shift indoors began. So I was in the kitchen when I got the call that Gavin had another Bluethroat in the Heligoland trap. The afternoon was a wash out: a day watched from the observatory lounge, hoping for birds when it finally stopped raining. It stopped raining. The birds came. I arrived at the nets just in time to see Gav emerge, grinning, holding a big bird bag. Hobby, he says. An Orkney rarity and the first to be ringed on the island. While I spread Bluethroat
Photo: Stephen Rutt
In the waterlogged start to June, I walk past a Lapland Bunting foraging under the chassis of three broken Volkswagen vans on bricks in a field of dandelions and clover. The vans are all missing bits — wheels, doors, etc — but the bunting is concerned only with insects and indeed I later learn that they need to eat at least 3,000 insects a day to sustain themselves. Its sharp chestnut nape contrasts with a black face and crown making it stand out starkly from the green grass. A typical spring migrant on North Ronaldsay, this one is so startlingly late that Mark jokes it should’ve been Cretzschmar’s, a symptom of the increasingly bizarre spring we were having. It wasn’t even the best looking bird on the island that day. That afternoon Mark found a male Rosefinch, a bird so bright it had us all gasping, dumb-struck. It sat on a stone wall amid lush greenery; hot pink and unapologetically — brilliantly — out of keeping with its surroundings.
Photo: Stephen Rutt
June Spring is a promise that never quite keeps itself. Every day of sun is followed by two of rain. The wind either doesn’t blow, or comes only from the west. Purple orchid tips, pushing their way through the soil end up petal-deep in sudden puddles. The grass hasn’t grown; the cows are still on silage. Islanders suck their teeth and say “Aye, and did you ever see the like?”. Yet the fuschia bushes have become a dense wall of green in the gardens. The shock of leaves in springtime.
T H E H AR R I ER – A ut um n 2 0 1 6
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