Saturday 3 August 2013

Blame It On The Heat Haze

Shamefully I didn't get out until 0640 this morning as I sampled one or two real ales last night and consequently as it had been light, and warm, for a couple of hours a heat haze had developed on the sea making viewing conditions tricky, bordering on useless! It was a shame as otherwise the weather conditions were quite good for an early August sea watch in as much as there had been a fairly stiff southwesterly wind for a couple of days and there was a morning tide.

However it wasn't to be and the sea was fairly quiet. In just under two hours all I recorded was a single Common Tern, three Gannets, five Cormorants, a Sandwich Tern and six Common Scoters. There were a number of Terns out in the heat haze and all I could say was that they were Terns!

Perhaps the best birds of the morning came towards the end of my watch when Ian and I decided to walk down the point and look at the waders; there wasn't many of them either! Ian shouted that he had four Little Terns going west close in and I got on them and there was actually at least six! There could just have been a couple more as they kept disappearing in wave troughs making counting accurately difficult.

As I hinted at above waders were in low numbers and I recorded 30 Oystercatchers, 52 Dunlins, two Grey Plovers (west), six Turnstones and 17 Ringed Plovers. The only visible migration I had were two Swallows west.

After my shortened seawatch I headed to the pools to remove my ropes from the net rides in preparation for switching my autumnal ringing effort to the coastal farm fields and hedges.

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