Find your own wing-barred ‘Phylloscs’

Owing to their far eastern origin, the Northern Isles and east coast are by far the best place to see all three species. However, their status as scarce migrants or rare vagrants means that few sites are guaranteed to produce birds, though many migrant hot-spots will certainly produce Yellow-browed at some point every autumn.

Keeping an eye on the winds will usually pay off for Yellow-browed Warbler, with September or October easterlies causing mass arrivals of the species, particularly on Shetland and Orkney, where they can occur in double figures. Away from the Northen Isles, the east and coastal headlands attract most birds, particularly at sites with a preponderance of willows and/or sycamores, or wet woodlands; they are seen less frequently on the west coast or inland.

On the east coast, try most of the wooded areas on the Northumberland coast; Flamborough Head (TA 223706), Filey Dams (TA 103811) or Spurn (TA 403177), all in East Yorkshire; Whitburn (NZ 412630), Co Durham; Gibraltar Point (TF 555583), Lincs; Wells Wood (TF 886436), Holkham Pines (TF 893437) and Great Yarmouth Cemetery (TG 511035), all in Norfolk; and Margate Cemetery (TR 351693), Kent. On the west coast, Heysham (SD 410614), Lancs, has a disproportionately high number of annual records, while in the South-West, birds regularly filter through to Scilly (SV 927157), Prawle Point (SX 772350), Devon, and Durlston Head (SZ 032772), Dorset.

Pallas’s Warbler is likely to turn up at the same sites, but in far fewer numbers, less regularly and less predictably, though influxes do occur. Hume’s Leaf Warbler is still a national rarity, with only 121 British records at the end of 2011. All the sites mentioned above, however, hold out the possibility of finding the species. Very few locations have multiple records, though, and it will always be a real achievement if you find your

own, and this can also be done inland on occasion, too.