Sunday 15 September 2013

Gail Force Hirundines

The wind was a 30 mph SSW this morning and that meant that the only thing to do was seawatching. By 0630 I was at the point looking seaward. The Hirundines in my blog title refer to the steady stream of Swallows that battled in a westerly direction in to the teeth of the gale! It was an amazing spectacle watching them attempt to move west and some were getting blown back and into the bay. In total Ian and I had 136 go through which was quite unexpected given the weather conditions.

I didn't see as many waders this morning because of the weather and it wasn't fit to wander up and down the point looking for them and counting them, so I relied on them coming past me and I recorded 59 Oystercatchers, 66 Turnstones (including one of our leg-flagged birds), nine Bar-tailed Godwits, three Dunlin, nine Sanderlings, eleven Ringed Plovers and two Curlews.

I knew it hadn't been blowing long enough for any Leach's, hopefully that will be tomorrow morning, but there was some passage on the sea including 53 Cormorants, 21 Common Scoters, 13 Gannets, 58 Sandwich Terns, two Shelducks, 18 Kittiwakes, two Manx Shearwaters, a Wigeon and two dark morph Arctic Skuas.

As I mentioned before the prospects look better for some proper seawatching tomorrow as the wind is going to be a fairly constant 30 mph westerly, which is a better direction for my seawatching site. I'll be out in the morning so I'll let you know how I get on.

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