Monday, October 27, 2008

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.)

5 comments:

Stewart said...

A bit premature there Alastair? Wednesday maybe?

Steve Gale said...

I'm impressed with what you see from your garden Alastair. It beats the Robins and Blue Tits that were the staple diet from your Hadlow garden, surely? I'm very envious.

Alastair said...

It was a bit premature but it wasn't too bad, better than today at any rate (see above). I can't do tomorrow, I think it's looking good for Friday though, what do you think?

Alastair said...

Steve,
Yes it's a great garden for birds and although we don't seem to be on a main flyway, we're on a side valley, quite a bit of stuff comes west up the valley. Surprisingly we get a fair bit of stuff going south also. The idea with the back garden is to have a bit of a wildlife garden - I think rather a lot of folk locally think it's a bit of a mess, but it's an organised mess and untidy is good for wildlife as we all know. I mean to work out the garden list and put it on the Badseawatcher Pages when I revamp them (coming soon(ish).

Stewart said...

Hope Friday is best. I'm off work! Forecast for light NE wind....