Still not exactly cooking with gas here, but I've lowered my expectations to a level where they match my experience, and as such I'm reasonably satisfied with today's haul of birds. Left work an hour early, in the secure knowledge that no one would ever know, unless I opened my big mouth, and sat on the clifftops from 16:35 - 17:50 before falling through the front door and begging for pity: 'Hi Honey, I'm hooommmmeeee!!! You would not believe the day I had...' etc.
There was a fresh southerly force 4-5 - witness the majority of the Northern Gannets going the wrong way - 55 N and an impressive 445 S, and big flocks of Black-legged Kittiwakes that i couldn't be arsed counting, and about 100 Guillemots and Razorbills, mostly sat on the water.
Two Little Gulls were the cute boys - both moulting 1st summer/2nd winter birds, going south among the feeding flocks of Kittiwakes. These Kittiwakes also pulled in 2 hungry Great Skuas, 23 Sandwich Terns south, 2 Common Terns and 1 Arctic Tern. I had 14 Red-throated Divers heading south, 8 Manx Shearwaters and 3 Sooty Shearwaters. Ducks... 20 Eurasian Wigeon going south, 2 Eurasian Teals inclugding another one that went to sit among the auks, and best of all... wait for it.... my last look at a flock of Wigeon as I was giving up to go home, had.. could it be.. come a little closer my dear... a female Pintail among them. Oh Glorious Patch tick!!
Not a bad illicit undercover birding haul, in all. And totally undetectable, until I got home and Diane mentioned that there were lots of Herring Gulls flying down towards the bay and I went: Oh, yeh, there were a couple of hundred down there earlier when... errr.. I was... errr... working...'
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