All day deluge

The Safari managed an unusual double yesterday. After seeing the Fox at the nature reserve we then saw one at the Golden Triangle whilst out with Frank on our late night constitutional. it's not often we see two of these in different locations in one day! No Peregrines could be seen roosting on the tower though.

This morning we didn’t get far on Patch 1 as we did a swift about turn and successfully dodged the rain.

Once it was light enough we got out onto Patch 2. The tide was low and there were many hundreds of gulls on the beach taking advantage of the morsels left in the strandline. Probably somewhere in the region of 2500 stretched out in front of us along the water’s edge. Also out there were about 200 Oystercatchers, guesstimated rather than counted with any degree of concentration, similarly there were about 50 Sanderlings and a couple of dozen Redshanks. The reason for the lack of commitment to the waders was all down to the large numbers of gulls, no time for waders when there were that many gulls to peruse.

Peruse we did and eventually found two ‘argentatus’ type Herring Gulls and a cracking adult Yellow Legged Gull.

All the while we were stood there the rain became heavier and heavier until we were forced to abandon our gullathon. What a good decision that turned out to be as it continued to rain heavily for the rest of the day.

No chance of seeing anything out at sea as we couldn’t see out to sea! By lunchtime there had been no improvement, worse if anything...so we dashed out to do a bit of Christmas shopping and got absolutely soaking wet dodging multitudes of slow old people who seemed to have the perfect knack of getting in the way just because we were short of time. And if people can’t drive in the wet don’t go out in the rain!!! Crikey a total traffic nightmare cos of a few puddles, alright some of them were bigger and deeper than normal but there’s no need to drive like you’re waiting for Noah’s Ark to come hurtling round the next corner – sheeeezzzz – we got back to the office totally fraught – almost chewed our back teeth right down to the roots!!!

There was no news of the Long Tailed Duck but we wouldn’t have had time to get that far north even though we were  over half way there.

Where to next? Day off tomorrow so who knows.

In the meantime let us know if Noah was spotted in your outback