Influx from Icelandic staging areas last week and brief census update

Slack wind conditions followed by a southerly airflow over Greenland/Iceland and between Iceland and GB/Ireland in advance of an approaching low (see image below) this time last week  (18th/19th Oct) saw a large influx of Icelandic migrants. Amongst which were Greenland Barnacles (which would have been staging in southern Iceland) arriving to Islay and W Ireland, Whoopers (breeding in Iceland and coming from various parts of Iceland including the major concentration at Lon in SE Iceland) and no doubt some of the 7000+ Brent that Gudmundur counted the preceeding weekend. 

The arrival of 'new' Brent was detected on Strangford by eagle-eyes McElwaine who noticed a wave of 'new rings' (new birds for this season, not present previously). So of course birds have been pushing south from Strangford at the same time at birds have been arriving in from farther north.

Census updates - additional records from Waterford and Kerry amongst other places have pushed our provisional 2016 total closer towards 38,000. We will report detail in some of the next posts.