Fry-day

Eh up. Compelled to document another boring seawatch - slightly under an hour this evening in a gentle northerly breeze, vomited up 5 Great Skuas going north, including 2 that decided to stop and bathe in front of me and eye up the Puffins. Also 1 Great Skua going south. 5 Manx Shearwaters went north, 67 Northern Gannets, 3 Sandwich Terns south and 37 Common Scoters that way inclined also. Hundreds of Black-legged Kittiwakes offshore, and the auks still going back n' forth. Mind I don't think I'm the only one who's had a boring day. Take this screenshot from the most excellent seawatch southwest website.

Admittedly a couple of Balearic Shearwaters woulds constitute a red-letter day for me, but on the whole, Porthgwarra wasn't very good today was it? Now I generally blame my lack of interesting sightings on the fact (or FACT - I never get tired of that, sorry) that I'm a crap seawatcher putting in crap hours at a crap sight, so the fact that I get crappy numbers of interesting birds seems pretty fair, on the cosmic scale. But if I were a really good seawatcher putting in 13 (thirteen!!) hours at one of Britain's top seawatch sites for that return, I think I'd be pretty aggrieved. 30 Manxies? Bet the Irish boys are wetting themselves at that. :-)

Also in today's news... newly fledged Rock Pipit learns one of life's harder, and indeed last, lessons - don't f*** with Sparrowhawks.


And once again, in the absence of anything interesting of my own to present, I'll pass on something interesting from Bob McGowan - an old advert from the Jourdain Society (hellspawn eggers) that, as Bob points out, would be unlikely to have appeared in British Birds.