Sykes's warbler, Girdle Ness, 30/09/2026

Note: This account was drafted the day after the bird was found - well before the finders account was published on Birdguides, but I'm only just getting round to publishing it a month later! For the very small number of people who read both this and Rob Minshull's finders account on Birdguides, they will read like two entirely different accounts. Our accounts focus on our own personal journies with this bird - Robs with Paul Baxter aiding the ID and mine with my own process (and help from others). The accounts read so differently to one another as the two processes were sort of happening independently of one another, and because of that, were pretty different. Ultimately we came to the same conclusion at the same time but via these independent processes. This is my take.

Sometimes the finding of a rare bird is a pretty simple chain of events to describe. Birder goes out, rare bird pops up in from of them, bird gets IDed, back of the net. Sometimes it's a lot less simple...

For about a week prior, I'd had my eye on the afternoon of Wednesday September 30th. Conditions on the Tuesday, in terms of SE winds, bits of rain, high pressure in all of the right places looked really promising. Then, on Wednesday afternoon the rain was forecast to stop and the wind to drop, so I took a punt and booked an early finish from work for the Wednesday.

It's not something that always happens these days but the great looking conditions actually delivered. Andrew Whitehouse was out on Wednesday morning and really made the most of it, finding a rustic bunting - a species I don't think there has been any more than a couple of records of in Aberdeenshire since I moved up here about 30 years ago. Bingo. He also mentioned, to a small Girdleness focussed whatsapp group, a 'weird looking small pale warbler' that had got away... Andrew was obviously really keen on this bird but given the brevity of his views he was understandably reluctant to put any sort of name to it.

Neither the rustic bunting or any weird warblers were reported for the rest of the day (a Lapland bunting and sporadic mentions of YBW were the only bits of news that came out before mid afternoon) so when I eventually got out, I was not really thinking too much about any of the stuff that had been seen earlier. I was going out with a clean slate so to speak, on a bit of borrowed time, and it felt very nice.

On arrival at the ness it was clear that birds had arrived. It was also clear that they were all song thrushes, with the air filled with 'tsip' and the 'chu chu chuk' calls of birds being flushed out of clumps of vegetation. A brambling showed nicely as I walked along the sunny side of the vegetation between the allotments and the battery.

My optimism soon started to wane a little though, as I struggled to find anything more than song thushes. A yellow-browed warbler showed in one of the clumps of willows below the battery, and a sparrowhawk menaced meadow pipits over the golf course, inevitably flushing thrushes wherever it went. I wandered around the battery, chatting briefly to a visiting birder and then decided that perhaps it wasn't quite as calm there as I'd hoped, and perhaps my best bet would be to head back towards the more sheltered areas around the allotments and the north bank. Turned out to be a decent move.

After bimbling past another yellow-brow I noticed a birder looking intently into a clump of bushes 100 yards or so along from the big sycamore. Then I got a little distracted by a pied flycatcher and a redstart both perched up on the same bit of fence in the corner of the allotments, and I spent a few moments enjoying these birds and photographing the flycatcher Looking back up the road I noticed that the birder was still staring into the same little clump of bushes. Best see what's going on over there then...

I crept up behind the guy (Rob Minshull) who was very focused on what was going on in front of him, and half whispered 'anything about'? His answer was strikingly similar to how Andrew had described his encounter earlier on - a weird pale warbler. Rob said he was considering a hippolais for this bird but it still needed a bit of sorting out.

Rob said it had been showing well and I didn't have to wait long before it popped out again. And when it did, wow - never has such a dull and nondescript bird made such an impression. It glowed in the late afternoon light, all warm toned above and crisp white below. Within a heartbeat I said to Rob that it was either a booted or a Sykes's warbler, but working out which one might be difficult - even if the bird was just sitting there in the sun. As we watched it and discussed features it turned out that another birder had also seen and photographed this bird with Rob, who was now wandering around some other part of Girdle Ness. So - I was at least the 4th person onto this bird!

I sort of lost track of time at this point but I realised that it was going to get dark at some point and some news should probably go out. I was erring towards Sykes's warbler but put the news out as an either/or in order to give folks as much of a chance as possible to get there.

I was erring towards Sykes's warbler for a number of reasons:

The bill was long, sort of spindly, and didn't appear to have any dark on the lower mandible. The tail was strikingly long and these two things, along with the warm tones on the upperparts, really gave the bird an acro feel. The supercilium was weak, narrow and nothing like what I would hope a booted to look like, and it was just so plain on the upperparts - there were no pale edges/dark centres to the tertials or the greater coverts.

So it felt like a Sykes's warbler but of course these things are mega and supposed to be very problematic in terms of ID. So I was falling into a funny position of being pretty convinced I had a mega in front of me but not having any experience to back that up, and wondering what I was missing. I was concerned that I shouldn't be as convinced as I was beginning to feel.

A few back-of-camera shots to the ABZ Whatsapp along with the line 'erring towards Sykes' was very quickly met with supporting messages from a few folk who know these things better than I do, and more thumbs up from other very good birders. I was happy that I had been erring in the right direction and even happier still to hear it call - a clean, hard 'tak' supporting Sykes's (although remarkably quiet - so much so that Rob couldn't even hear it!) rather than the more complex and gravelly call of a booted.

And that was that, other than to mention what a striking bird this was. I've never seen anything quite like it in terms of the colour palette (crisp white/warm buff) and how long tailed and long billed it looked. The photos below really don't capture this jizz but it really made an impression. I think we got lucky - this was definitely at the easier end of the Sykes's warbler ID scale, but it was still pleasure to puzzle it out and to have early suspicions confirmed.