Kittiwake surge and a feeding Osprey

A warm and mainly sunny day. The light NE early morning breeze switched to NW mid morning then became variable by the afternoon.

Seawatch report - Pete:

Sea Heysham (MP, JR, PM).  Headwind today with no easterly element.  Large chunks of watching paint dry but this all changed 20 mins before HT with massive Kittiwake movement.  606 were counted heading in and up and judging by all the calls two significant north-east bound flocks couldn’t be picked up overhead in the blue sky.  Amazing how far the sound carried from these flocks.  All but handful passed through in a 35 minute period up to and over HT

Another 83 kitts on the sea to the south of the outfalls which hadn’t made a move before we left so different birds (MD). So minimum total 689

Others:

Fulmar 1

Gannet - 12

Common scoter 10 plus 7

Guillemot - 10

Sandwich Tern - 33 in, 16 out - no blogging today 

(Probable v distant little tern) 

I would suspect any skuas or arctic terns today would have been way up out of sight before reaching heysham based on the behaviour of the usually more reluctant to overland Kitts

Also on south side (Malcolm)

Osprey 1 - it tried fishing but failed to catch anything.

It has a blue ring on its right leg, unfortunately characters not legible 

It rested on the post at the seaward end of No.2 outflow for a while

Before heading off, empty taloned, to the east.

An influx of Herring gulls, there were c170 on the wooden jetty - more on this later

Linnet 3 between lighthouse and waterfall 

No sign of the Rock Pipits

Willow Warbler 1 in scrub near lighthouse 

Silver Y all along the foreshore grass.

Heysham skear - low water (Malcolm)

Eider 128

Red-breasted Merganser 5

Little Egret 3

Just three wader species today

Oystercatcher 400

Knot 35

Turnstone 1

There is always a gull presence here, up until today roughly split 20 each Herring and Lesser Black-backed. But today the influx of Herring gulls seen earlier on the wooden jetty was feeding here. I estimated 160 Herring gulls. The seed mussels are not showing yet, but they were clearly finding something to eat. Presumably there is more food to go around now that the bulk of waders have left. These are just some of them.

Middleton Nature Reserve 

Broad-bodied Chaser by Janet this morning

I just had a quick look at the main pond this evening (Malcolm). The only other dragonflies seen were 3 four-spotted Chaser.

This Little grebe has caught quite a sizeable (relative to its size) fish, but makes short work of it!

But less than three minutes later it had caught an even larger one. This was a struggle to swallow. It took over two minutes and it had three goes before finally managing to swallow it. This clip shows the initial preparation, then skips to the final, successful attempt to swallow it.

And then it went back fishing again!