A late opportunity flits buy

The Safari was hoping to have a good session seawatching yesterday. There was no chance at lunchtime as the very high tide and fierce wind meant the wall was no place to be! Well not for anyone with any sense or who wanted to stay dry as huge waves crashed over the top and great gobbets of sea-foam were been blown across the promenade.

We wanted to get out and watch the dropping tide a couple of hours after high tide. The gas boiler service man was due at Base Camp mid afternoon so that knocked any chance of a watch on the head – why do these things always seem to clash?

By the time he’d finished and given the boiler the AOK the wind had dropped to just about nothing and any storm blown birds would have drifted back out to sea. Later we read that the South-side had scored a direct hit  

This morning in the post-dawn drizzly gloom we heard calls of a Redpoll(s?) passing overhead.

Patch 2 wasn’t so good with only a single Meadow Pipit providing the ‘vis’. At sea the usual 200 or so Common Scoters tazzed this way and that...why are they continually on the move in all directions, where exactly is it the want to be and what’s there that’s so interesting/important to them? Minutes before we were about to give up we spotted the nose of a Grey Seal protruding from the waves in the near to middle distance.

Mid morning whilst waiting for the kettle to boil we had a quick spin round the grounds but failed to connect with any Yellow Browed Warblers or Pallas’s Warblers :-( we did find a Dunnock and a Blackbird’s nest from the summer.

The lunchtime Patch 2 session was a good bit more exciting (and a good bit warmer – almost t-shirt sleeves pleasant out there) as we watched the last few minutes of the rising tide.

Several small flocks of Pintail flew by totalling 80+ and we found a Red Throated Diver and a Great Crested Grebe both now in winter plumage. A single Shelduck came past us going south as did a single Oystercatcher. Half a dozen middle distance single Common Gulls all heading south could have been a little late passage.

We re-found the Grey Seal a few hundred yards to the north of our vantage point and decided to walk up that way to see if he was photographable being not too far offshore. As we walked passed the fishermen on the slade one of them hauled in a Small Spotted Catshark (aka Dogfish - bizarre change of names there).
Reaching a likely spot we searched for the seal for a good few minutes before relocating him by which time it had drifted further north still and further out so no chance of a pic this arvo and by now it was time to get back in to the office anyway.

A late afternoon/early evening Grey Wagtail while out with Frank was a vis mig bonus. 

Where to next? Out with the school group tomorrow afternoon - wonder what they'll find this time.

In the meantime let us know what snuck past your outback in the wind.