Saturday and John A and I headed down South, we intended to visit lots of places but as usual we got delayed at Cowpen Bewley, cut short our visit to Saltholme, extended our 5min stop at Newburn to over an hour, then wandered round the Headland for a couple of hours and stood looking through the gates of the Fish Quay at 100s if not 1000s of Gulls. The tale is too boring, lengthy and uninteresting so here is some pretty (well sort of) pictures for you to enjoy/dislike/ignore/laugh at (delete as appropriate)
We heard several singing and each time we stopped, listened and watched (absolute magic)
Also spotted the Smew but not sure if we spotted the Ring-necked Duck so will have another
look during the week.
The Water Rail showed well from the Watchpoint and prior to that a couple of Little Egret flew over, a Bittern made a couple of appearances and a brief chat with Ian F was highly informative. We never made it round to the main Saltholme hide as we planned to as our walking speed decreased as we found more interesting things to look at.
We stopped at Newburn Bridge to have our lunch and whilst disposing of a couple of chips John
spotted a Med Gull diving down for it. The next 30mins was spent feeding said Gull and at one
stage there was 2 Med Gulls present, the chap in the next car photographing them also said
that there is normally 3 there. So heres another 2 pics to make up the total to 3.
We then moved round to the Headland to have a look at the Gulls and see what we
could spot.
Out of the thousands we could see the only white winged one that we could
recognise was this 1st Year Glaucous Gull. This was later confirmed by a
Gull expert (he said he was from Newcastle so must have been at expert at
something)who arrived to look at them also (maybe expert is a bit strong
as he said he knew a little bit and confirmed it was what we thought).
On the headland beach was quite a lot of stuff including this Bar-tailed
Godwit. I always thought of them as slightly bigger than the average
wader but when I saw it next to a bottle of water I was quite suprised.
Also on the Headland were quite a few Dunlin and Knot.
Tomorrows exciting episode will consist of Pictures which I havent got round to
sorting yet ????????????????????????????way
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