The wind seemed due west this morning at Rossall and as it had blown all yesterday and overnight at a fair old strength I thought a Leach's Petrel or two was a dead cert., obviously not! Pete at Heysham Bird Observatory felt that the wind was WWNW, which would just put enough north in the westerly to make it useless on our stretch of coast.
Stonking views of a dark juv Arctic Skua exceedingly close in kicked things off and Ian and I thought that would be it and we would have a reasonable morning, but that was the highlight! Distant Kittiwakes followed the shipping in and out of Heysham and in total we had 44 'pale' Kittiwake shaped specks bouncing along the horizon. Not seawatching at its best!
Other bits and pieces included 4 Common Scoters, 3 Pintails, Great Crested Grebe, 8 Black-tailed Godwits, 7 Eider, 3 Auk sp. and 4 Bar-tailed Godwits. We even had a single Meadow Pipit at sea battling west through the huge wave troughs!
After two and a half hours I'd had enough and headed home. The forecast for tomorrow is for it to be northwesterly proper, so as I said before that will make it useless along our stretch of coast.
1 comment:
Another lovely browse and read.. apologies for not looking in for a while... hols etc
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