Saturday 9 January 2016

Rain Stopped Play

With the onset of the awful wet weather it was a good time to earn some brownie points and give the lounge a once over.  However, after getting most done I couldn't miss the lovely morning on the 6th and got out for a couple of hours.  The flat calm and sunny conditions enabled me to give the Seasalter bay a good scan, finding 2 red-throated divers, 78 g.c.grebes, 5 mergansers, 83 ringed plovers, 9 sanderling plus plenty of dunlin and few turnstones on the high tide roost.

Out again on the 8th and down to SS finding 4 mergansers this time plus the grebes and on the plots 1 SEO. and  1 stonechat. I didn't stay long as it looked quiet and went see the birds at Bossenden.




Later in the afternoon I went back to SS finding 3 SEOs, 2-3 marsh harriers and 5 red-legged partridges (which over the last few years have been extremely rare). 





9th. Today, seemed fairly quiet at SS, I had a walk around the plots seeing 2 SEOs and discovered a sheep in the 'river' and pretty exhausted, unfortunately on the other side. I had the shepherds number and called him to which he responded after about 20 minutes, hopefully he managed to save it.

After that I made a social visit to the 'Swalecliffe posse' picking up gannet and eider ticks for the year.


2 comments:

Bernie Weight said...

You did well on your time away the decorating Mike with some good birds and images. As for Red-legged Partridge I dipped on that last year.Short-eared Owls seemed to have disappeared at the Bay of late.

Warren Baker said...

The second SEO shot is a cracker Mike :-)