Wheatears

Hi Brian et al
Just seen your note. Rather than say my own bit, I cant do any better than to point in the direction of the BTO. Dawn Balmer, the BirdTrack Organiser summed the situation up quite nicely last month, with a graph to back it up see:

http://www.bto.org/birdtrack/news_archive.htm

This takes you to the old BirdTrack notes. Look for the note written on 05-05-2005 about Wheatears and click where it says. This goes straight to the graph.

Dawn confirms everything said so far about the twin peaks of passage, which is what we also have been saying for some while with the Greenlands in the second peak. On 02-05-2005, I too had the largest count I have ever had with 44 spread about and around our watchpoint. With regard to our birds becoming less common, I tend to agree as here where there were usually three pairs in the in-bye c15 years ago, there is now only in some years a single pair. I cant however speak for other sites. Here out of interest are Mick Cunninghams thoughts:

http://vismig.blogspot.com/2005/04/greenlanders.html

Hope these links work ok.
Best wishes, Dave.