The recorder was out last night despite the rain and captured a bird at 23:39 that proved to be quite interesting. It was flagged by the BTO Acoustic Pipeline as a Dunlin with 0.92 probability, so fairly high. I had a listen and wasn’t convinced at first because the calls were not a clear Dunlin flight call – they were close but a but too downslurred to be a classic Dunlin call. After I bit of research I found a very similar call – the bottom one on this page – which convinced me in the end to record it as Dunlin.
However, Chris Batty reviewed it after I’d uploaded it and suggest it was Common or Arctic Tern. After another listen and some further research I agreed it was. I’m still not sure which of the two it is but it’s still a great nocmig record. I’m leaning towards Arctic only on the basis that the sonogram doesn’t have the harmonics above 3khz that most Common call show, but that could be just that the call was distant and it was raining too so maybe only the lower frequency end of the call carried.
And this is the sonogram
There was nothing else of note other than the regular Tawny and Barn Owls.