Seawatch

There's an Arctic Tern in there somewhere

Out in the dark and then the tramp to the seawatch spot. I've stayed faithfull to the new place although it's a bit further to walk. I'd barely got myself sat down when an interesting looking duck went north, a quick fight with the scope and it proved to be, as suspected, a drake Velvet Scoter. Good start. However, the wind was not far enough around, still mostly westerly really so it all proved a bit slow. Next up was an adult Mediterranean Gull which went rather distantly south. There were quite a lot of small gulls about, mostly Black-headed Gulls, difficult to know how many really as they would feed for a while and then scoot off south but 4-500 would be a reasonable guess in the 2 hours. Three fairly distant Whooper Swans battled their way north on the hour. An interesting looking diver sp was my following customer, I couldn't id it though. It might have been a Black-throat but I'm not going to stick my neck out. Off Denmark two little dots went north which were very likely Little Auks, alas too far away to be sure. For the final twenty minutes or so I scrutinised the quite large flock of feeding gulls, hoping for another Med to be honest but was better pleased with a smart Arctic Tern feeding amongst them. Also on offer this morning were 11 Gannet, about 8 or 9 Kittiwake, a few Guillemot on the sea and 2 Red-throated Diver also on the sea.

Garden stuff needed to be done at home and Louise found the birds of the day. "What's that?" I looked up into the blue and there way, way up, white and glimmering against the blue were four Whooper Swans directly above the house heading west, totally excellent. (And in the air space so a garden tick.)