More than we bargained for

The Safari looked out to sea as ominous dark clouds lurked this side of the horizon on our drive to work...rain looked seriously near and with a north westerly wind it wasn’t very promising.

But you’ve gotta give it a go so we grabbed the scope and set off over the road for a quick five minutes gander at the high tide.

We soon realised it was a bit better than it looked when we picked up a line of 11 Gannets. More followed and more and still they came. We decided to stay out til we’d got to 100 but the movement stalled at 74. In between bouts of Gannets we had small flocks of Kittiwakes, about 30 altogether – some to-ing and fro-ing made a ‘proper’ count a bit difficult. About 100 Common Scoters in small groups went past, but no Velvet Scoters, apparently we’d not long missed two. A Red Throated Diver got up off the water in the middle distance and headed off high further out to sea into the wind while a Great Crested Grebe was found close inshore. We saw just two Sandwich Terns, well short of the 50 or more seen earlier.

The dropping tide at lunchtime had little on the beach and little out at sea either. All we could muster were three more gannets, a Sandwich tern and a little raft of Common Scoters behind which was another little raft – normally associated with being vertical plane rather than horizontal one – a Razorbill and what looked like a Guillemot and a Kittiwake, a bit hard to tell at the distance in the swell.

Before we left a Curlew flew past well out to sea, looked a little short in the beak and if it did call it was way to far out for us to have been able to hear it...the first Whimbrel can’t be far off though. 11 Turnstones flew in from further up the beach and landed on the wall below us.

A bonus evening session gave us two more Gannets and a couple of spanking Little Gulls etched crisp white against a foreboding looking black horizon.

A small bait ball attracted a couple of dozen gulls but once gain we couldn’t see any cetaceans below them.

Where to next? More of the Patch 2 same...but will there be another Gannet spectacular?

In the meantime let us know what’s showing well against the dark skies in your outback.