Shetland day 2: bring your waders

Our base for the first two nights on Shetland was a remote croft at Collaster on the western part of the Mainland. The croft had only been recently made available for self-catering and the owner had been taken aback by the level of interest in the property. He was a good host though, and as well as a warm welcome we found a fridge stocked with an impressive selection of breakfast meat. Keen to get out in the morning, we saved this for an evening fry-up, and while unlikely to appear in the M&S 'healthy eating' range anytime soon, it was an impressive spread.

Snipe

Golden Plover

Several frying pans were needed to hold the meat feast laid on for us: bacon, sausages, black pudding, haggis and saucermeat - a sort of offal-based, sausage-slab affair as far as we could tell, and apparently a Shetland speciality, pronounced by the locals as 'sossermit', almost in a single syllable.

Brambling

Ruff

Before that though there was birding to be done and bearings to be got. We started as we meant to go on, hunting out likely looking patches of habitat and grilling them for birds before moving on to the next. Over the next 24 hours my Shetland education continued, and I started to appreciate the radical differences between birding the archipelago in autumn and birding at home. Whereas in Dorset I might go to an extensive patch of specialist habitat or a nature reserve, up here a patch could be a tiny stand of willows or even a solitary tree.

Great Northern Diver

Great Northern Diver

Similarly, whereas at home I would typically avoid areas of human habitation in search of wildlife, on Shetland, gardens are one of the most likely locations to find the cover necessary to attract birds in an otherwise treeless landscape. 'Walk in the ditch, not in the road' was one of the many rules of the game to be observed and good guidance it was too - over the course of the coming days this flushed out a number of birds - nothing particularly rare, but enough to prove the wisdom of the advice. The poor weather continued, so there was also a bit of birding from the car in that first few days - a good way to see waders in roadside fields.

Hooded Crow

Slavonian Grebe