Friday night and a trip to Big Waters with John (Sedgedunum Warbler). The scrape was empty but there was plenty swimming around including 9 Little Grebes. A couple of Pochards joined the Tufted Ducks and plenty of Mallards were spread around with the Moorhen count increasing to 15. The Prince of Darkness dropped in and settled on the Tree in the Pond and stayed there for over 2hours.
Grey Heron
Once again a few visits from a Kingfisher who was there for quite a considerable time again flitting from perch to perch
Kingfisher
A Green Sandpiper flew through the pond but didn't stop and a couple of Willow Tits again graced the Feeding Station although in the Sightings Book it did say that Alan J and John D did ring 3 of them earlier in the day during their Constant Effort Ringing. One of the Willow Tits I saw was not wearing any bangles so once the ringers are obviously not working hard enough.
Willow Tit
The next morning I picked up Sedgedunum Warbler at 06.00 and headed up North intending to start at Low Newton and work our way down the coast. Too much waffling on in the car and we overshot our turnoff and decided to start at Budle Bay. It was magnificent as usual but could have done with one of the new Swarovski 95s to check a lot of the birds out. The bay was littered with birds but nothing out of the usual that we could see but it was a very pleasant hour. We then headed down to Stag Rocks where we only intended to have a quick look but the amazing sight of a raft of 61 Goosanders although to be perfectly honest I did believe they were Mergansers due to the location swimming South although there was probably more as we could see them diving as they swam along and the best picture I have shows only 57.
Goosander Raft
We then visited Stringers Scrape but to save you being bored with reading more tomes here is a video of the Scrape
Stringers Scrape
After that we headed for Amble to fill our empty stomachs. Will finish off tomorrow as I am just about to watch the Olympics Closing Ceremony
3 comments:
Are they not Gooseanders
Brian
Ditto to Goosanders
I worded my previous comment incorrectly and it should read. Yes they are Goosanders but I used the word Mergansers which is the NAmerican term and when I looked them up prior to entering (was checking on large rafts/flocks of them) I did see the term Goosander but carried on using the word Merganser (yeah really). Now the question is have I dug my hole even deeper to get out of this or not ;-) , or could I go even further to say I use americanisms because I once lived there when I was 14 which wasn't all that long ago (Im pretty good at maths also).
John
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