Brass Monkey Weather

My other half had to go to Castleford in West Yorkshire today for her sins which meant an alarm call of 06:00 and I decided to get up with her. I knew that I only had a couple of hours available this morning so I wanted to make sure that I was at Rossall Point for first light. An hour and a half later and I was sat in the car park waiting for it to get light enough to start birding! There was a heavy frost this morning, in fact the frost was lying on the beach.


I didn't really want to start my blog today by complaining about dog walkers (again) but I wanted to mention an absolute plonker of a bloke that walks his overweight, bow legged dog (just like himself) along the beach every day flushing all the waders. Ian has tried to talk to him in the past, but he is one of those ignorant tossers that just ignores you and does his own thing. The reason I am mentioning him now is that soon after I had started birding he arrived and started flushing the waders that I was trying to count!

As you walk on to the sea front from the car park there is an area of shore that waders like to feed on and today was no exception with 11 Grey Plovers and 10 Turnstones. Just to the west of here on the beach, as the tide ran in, 392 Oystercatchers were roosting. And then everything was up and away as the resident tosser came staggering along the beach with his dog like some zombie extra from a Michael Jackson video.

Out on the sea it was quiet and all I had were 36 Eiders, 27 Common Scoters and 36 Cormorants. Most of the Common Scoters were a long way out, but I did have a couple of females close in giving stonking views. No sign though of Ian's female Velvet Scoter from yesterday. There is a shingle island developing off shore and I have noticed recently that if the high tides are fairly low the Cormorants abandon their 'Wyre Light' roost and roost on here instead.

Just past the Coastguard's Tower I had a calling Rock Pipit, but I couldn't get on it, and the Stonechats were feeding on the dunes and on the sea front. The usual two males and a female were present and were as confiding as usual, and 70 'Pink-feet' headed the wrong way and flew north over the bay!

Twenty Sanderling and forty Ringed Plovers dropped in to roost and somehow managed to avoid being flushed by 'you know who' but did eventually get flushed by another dog walker later on.

Ringed P

Sanderlings

The forecast for tonight is rain, that has started as I type, but it is supposed to clear early tomorrow morning so hopefully I'll get out for an hour or two.