Fannie Mac ate my hamster

Sleeping the sleep of the just... woken by the rain hammering against the bedroom window. Are Sooty Shearwaters really worth getting that wet for? You betcha. Go go go. And to the clifftop, but it really is wet, and visibility is down to a kilometre. I didn't think I was going to see much, and by and large I was right, i.e. 06:55 - 08:00, 208 Northern Gannets, 44 Northern Fulmars and just 29 Black-legged Kittiwakes, all north, perhaps tells you how little there was to see. But I did get 3 Sooty Shearwaters, at the edge of visibility, which in fact was quite close in, and best of all, a Black Tern - only my second patch record. There was a small movement of Eurasian Teal (11N), 2 Great Skuas N, and 2 Red-throated Divers south.

I also went round Newtonhill, pishing into all the sheltered gardens I could find in the hope that Boulmer Birder and Alastair weren't hogging all the migrants, but they were - there was nothing here at all. Deid. But still raining. When I eventually got home I had to burn all my clothes. The jeans were the worst as a Spaniel had licked them. Diane even threw a few pairs of my old pants onto the pyre, to make sure they died.

During the day, I saw there had been a small passage of Sooties at Girdle Ness, so with visibility back to normal and the water stopped falling from the sky, I went out for another seawatch 17:45-19:00. By this time, after that dog had licked my morning jeans and the good clean sky had p*ssed on them, and Peter had vomited copiously over my afternoon jeans, I was on my third pair of keks for the day. But now there were some things to see. Mostly Black-legged Kittiwakes actually - there was a feeding flock of 500+, almost at the horizon, and I could see 2 Arctic Skuas acrobatically harassing them. Closer in, there was a decent passage of Kittiwakes too - 527 north, and another 4 Arctic Skuas passing through, with 5 Great Skuas. At about 18:00 a Long-tailed Skua came through, about 800 m out - dark juvenile. An uncharacteristically easy one too: tiny weedy thing with a wasted rear end and little stick wings and hardly any white in the wings.

I was hoping for a passage of Sooties, but got 34 Manx Shearwaters heading north and no other species. Bearing in mind Sooites were obviously going through at lunchtime, the only word to describe them is 'capricious' Maybe not the only word. But it is a good one.

There were at least 30 Sandwich Terns, 2 Common Terns north, and 8 Arctic Terns (2N 6S), but as rare as Long-tailed Skua in a Newtonhill context was the single Tufted Duck that flew north, reminding me that Greater Scaup remains a hole on the Newtonhill list that by rights should have been filled before Tufty.

229 Northern Gannets north and 2 south, 59 Northern Fulmars north. Sadly nothing amusing happened. Just birds today.