On Tuesday of this week, Gail and I completed the last of our wintering bird surveys. The forecast was a bit hit and miss, and we had to do the first 20 minutes of the survey from the car because of rain, but later in the morning the clouds cleared and it was quite a glorious morning.
Skylarks have been a constant backdrop to these surveys over recent weeks, and this morning we had two singing from on high, with a further four firmly on the deck. In the same field that the Skylarks were so beautifully singing over, were 98 Woodpigeons and four Stock Doves. Contrast the song of the Skylark to the harsh croak of the Raven that flew over us, but Ravens are magical in other ways.
A few Pink-footed Geese were on the move, and I mean a few, with just 63 counted, heading north. A flock of 110 Golden Plovers were heading west as always (towards the estuary), and we had a singing Chiffchaff, our only summer migrant of the morning. Three Little Egrets, and the same number of Tree Sparrows, plus a single Buzzard, were the highlights. I suppose for us, completing our last wintering bird survey of the winter, formally brings winter to a close.
Back home after dark, I was getting some logs from my log store, when the black magic happened. I heard a call that was at once unfamiliar, but yet vaguely familiar, of a group of birds flying over in the darkness. I heard a group at 1950, 1955 and again at 2004. The penny dropped, and I realised what they were, so I went back indoors to double check that I what I heard were groups of Common Scoters flying over in the dark. And indeed, that is exactly what they were.
It's hard to describe the call. The Collins Bird Guide describes the nocturnal flight call, which is given by the male, as a soft piping 'pyu' regularly repeated about once per second. That'll do. I'm not 'techie' enough to post an audio file on my blog, so if you want to hear what a Common Scoter sounds like, search in Google, or click HERE, and this will take you to the Common Scoter page on Xeno-Canto, where you can listen to wildlife sounds from around the world.
The Common Scoters will have been coming in off the Irish Sea, to start their over-land migration to the North Sea, and then on to breeding grounds in Scandinavia. The last time I heard Common Scoters over the garden was during lockdown, and in that year, they were reported by lots of birders across the UK.
It was wet during the morning on the following day, but by lunchtime it had cleared up, and the sun was out. Even though the wind was north-westerly, I thought that it would be likely that a Wheatear or two would be about, so Gail and I headed to the coast at Rossall to have a look on the golf course, a good place for an early Wheatear. Sure enough, after a few minutes, a male Wheatear was flying from post to post in front of us. It looked resplendent in the sunshine, and I managed a few distant shots, as you will see below.
That was the only migrant that we had though. A pair of Coots had a nest on the pool, and one of the adults was incubating. On the walk back we kept to the shore, and on the Honeycomb Worm reef, at least 40 Turnstones were feeding. Just off the reef, two pairs of Eiders were loafing on the ebbing tide.
The forecast for this morning was for a 20 mph westerly wind, and there was a morning tide, so I decided to head again to Rossall and have a look on the sea. I was hoping for an early Sandwich Tern, but that wasn't to be.
Surprisingly, given the wind strength, Meadow Pipits were heading north across the bay, heading towards Walney. The coast runs east to west here, where Liverpool and Morecambe Bays meet, and any visible migration of passerines is usually easterly in the spring and westerly in the autumn. However, sometimes, depending on the wind strength and direction, and the visibility, they will cross the bay at its widest point. I logged 53 doing just that, but there was quite a lot more, because sometimes when I was counting Kittiwakes or watching a Red-throated Diver for example, I could see Mipits whizzing past my scope view at sea.
The Kittiwakes were a little bit of a surprise this morning, and we (Howard had joined me) had 114 motoring east into the bay. They were a long way out, and they were shearing up and down, appearing above, and then disappearing below the horizon. If I managed to stay with a few as they headed east, they were slowly starting to climb, so just like the Common Scoters, they would have been heading across land to the North Sea.
The Red-throated Divers were heading in the wrong direction, as out of the seven that we recorded, only one was heading into the bay. I suspect that because the wind was quite strong from the west, they were just heading into wind. I have seen this with a wide range of species, where they are seemingly heading in the wrong direction.
We had three Auk sp., 13 Eiders, eight Common Scoters and two Gannets, and that was it. It's looking a bit unsettled tomorrow, but Sunday is looking better, with an opportunity to have a look on the sea again.
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