First Swallow - albeit a bit late!

Calm and clear till mid morning then the west breeze picked up slightly. Increasing cloud cover leading to some light afternoon showers, then a major evening downpour, of what is probably best described as wet hail.

Low water around the skear birds.

Count by Pete:

261 Eider

8 Great Crested Grebe 

13 Red-breasted Merganser

32 Pale-bellied Brent goose

I walked out on the skear. It was clam and sunny at low water, allowing both some clear pictures and videos not blighted with the sound of the wind, just the sounds of the skear (MD).

This first shot is just to give a feel of the skear this morning. A flat calm sea. Two
Cormorants relaxing on Conger rock, and a ship disappearing over the horizon
(or sinking into the sea, depending on your  view of the earth!)

This clip you can hear the soft grunts of the Brent and the (Frankie Howard like) display calls of the Eider, plus the ubiquitous Oystercatcher.

It's nice to see the Brent so relaxed now, after a winter of scraping the bottom of the weed barrel, by feeding on the gutweed directly below the sea wall. The weed in that area is now almost a metre long as they have not ventured there since abundant weed became available in other areas. It just shows how much they must have braced themselves to feed amongst the regular dog walkers. Weed is plentiful all around the skear now, this is a nice shot of three Brent, the lead bird can't even be bothered to eat the strand of gutweed dangling from its bill.

Pale-bellied Brent geese

This Great Black-Backed gull has found a dead plaice. It's currently too wide for it to swallow, but it won't give up. It will work on it at low water, then leave it till low water the following day. After a few days the cumulative effects of its pummelling plus the mass reduction by shrimps crabs etc, will enable it to swallow the carcass. I've known them spend a week with a fish, this one won't take that long, it is a "spent" plaice (recently spawned), so it's already very thin.

About 16:00 the sky went black and a very heavy hail shower started. I went to check if it had grounded anything.

This Wheatear was on the saltmarsh, it was motionless (sadly, unlike myself - sorry about the wobbling). It seemed to be in a torpor, perhaps ruminating on the wisdom of leaving warmer climes.

This clip is a minute later, still motionless, then suddenly, quite early in the clip, it becomes very animated and casts out a waste pellet. So, it was indigestion (literally). After that it was quite active, the hail was easing, so it moved on just after this clip. I wonder where the source of the pellet was originally eaten (MD)

This is a still from the above clip. The pellet is circled after it rolled down the rock.

Middleton Nature Reserve 

The hail was easing. Wildfowl as yesterday. But this is where the Swallows were. At leat 2, probably 3.

One of this evening's Swallows over the main pond