Sadly no silhouette

The Safari set off this morning in the cold and frosty darkness armed with the trusty bins. 49 Magpies counted roosting in Magpie Wood would have hit the notebook had we been able to get the gloved hand in to the pocket. Yesterday teatime whilst playing footy with Frank we saw that the Peregrine was on its roosting ledge in the dark but five hours later it had gone and hadn’t reappeared by this morning, given that it was a calm night we would have expected it to have been there all night.
With bins at the ready we got in to the park and had a look through the twiggy tree tops with the naked eye first – nothing, not a blob of anything out of the ordinary just plain ol’ twigs – how annoying is that! We had the bottom end of the park to ourselves as the usual crowd of early morning dog walkers hadn’t arrived yet...we could hear them coming through the gate at the top of the hill...scanning the trees along the bottom perimeter again we could see nothing resembling a strange or untoward silhouette – damn thing as b*ggered off!!! Will it have reappeared tomorrow morning?
No Patch 2 safari this morning, we were scuppered by traffic jams. Wifey was away on business in the Big Smoke (London) and we had to take Frank to his dog-sitter a little to the north of Base Camp – the opposite way to work. Getting from there to work (5 miles) took a WHOLE ENGLISH HOUR!!! Damn those traffic jams!!! We sat there going nowhere fast watching the fuel gauge dropping like a very heavy stone...Consequently we didn’t have time to do the early safari. OK OK we know a ton of feathers falls at the same rate as a ton of bricks or a very heavy stone!
The lunchtime safari did take place; a little later than normal but we managed to get out just in the nick of time. As we started to scan the beach a woman with two dogs was approaching the outfall pipe from the north. On the muddy area on the south side of it were two Knots. Wow Knots...they are really rare on the beach here – regularly get flocks of them flying past but as rare as rocking horse sh*t for them to be feeding along our bit of beach. Needless to say she flushed them...bloomin marvelous. Also there were two Sanderlings with only another six of the dashing little chaps along the rest of the water’s edge.
A trawl through the gulls didn’t take long as there weren’t very many but doing so we did pick up a Grey Plover and another rare wader, a Ringed Plover – the first for a very long time!
As per usual all the action was beyond our southern boundary – we wouldn’t like to say how many Oystercatchers there were but a roosting mass of them looked like a black blob on the beach with many hundreds of others feeding on the sand banks. There was a huge roost of extremely distant Cormorants too and more gulls than you could shake a stick at.
Out at sea the light was horrid although the, less snowy than yesterday, Welsh mountains and their crowning clouds were illuminated with a lovely pink tinge from the insipid winter sunshine.
Nothing spectacular to report from the open sea, indeed nothing unspectacular to report either, which just about sums up exactly how unexciting it was out there.
Far too dull for any sort of pics today.
Where to next? Will the silhouette return or has it gone for good?
In the meantime let us know what didn’t put in an appearance in your outback.
BTW the mountain, Carnedd (the dd is pronouced th) Llewellyn, photographed yesterday is about 60 miles away; just in case you were wondering...you probably weren’t.