The Safari sped to the wall this morning to find a rather empty beach. The wind had dropped significantly over night. A much smaller shellfish wreck was being rummaged through by only a few hundred gulls and it didn't take log to find nothing untoward amongst them.
Oystercatchers were quite numerous and a count gave us 122, but not a single Sanderling. We tried looking at the northern part of the beach but there was very little in the way of a tide line and consequently very few gulls. Another 44 Oystercatchers probed about near the water's edge making 166 in total, again no Sanderlings on this stretch of beach either.
It was still quite choppy out to sea but we coun't find anything othere than a few small flocks of Common Scoters, visibility beyond the middle distance was very poor.
At lunchtime the highest waves of the rising tide had already started to wet the promenade on 'our' side of the wall but where we usually stand was still splash free. Not much was out there, a reasonable number of Common Gulls drifted past in the near middle distance and we found two Great Crested Grebes tucked in with the Common Scoter flocks not far behind the surf.
A Red Throated Diver came in from the NW and landed in the chop not to be seen again.
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| Duff pic of a rather distant Common Gull - very heavy crop, t'was but a dot in the distance |
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| Coupla Black Heads |
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| Same two |
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| Three distant Common Scoters - almost invisible to the naked eye |
Persistence paid off when we found two adult Little Gulls tracking a small flock of Common Gulls southwards which were followed not too many minutes later by two more singles...always nice to see these delicate little 'up-side-sown' fellas.
Where to next? The weekend may provide something a little different.
In the meantime let us know how choppy it is in your outback.
Peregrine roosting on the tower too - that's three nights on the trot.
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