Afternoon all

Heysham Obs
Unusually no morning coverage whatsoever today and the early afternoon saw a quick visit to the north harbour wall where there was no available food and the dreaded three pigeons plus a rabbit were digging into the sand to find morsels. I put a small amount of nyger down which was in the car and, after a quick walk round, a decent flock of 54 finches materialised on the seed: 41 Linnet and 13 Goldfinch. As far as could be seen only 13/41 Linnet were ringed but about 10/13 Goldfinch bore a mixture of right and left leg rings, possibly indicating that some were ringed by the NR office. As also stressed by a visiting ringer, its really important for a feeding station to guarantee a dawn food supply, but that is easier said than done with people's committments and nocturnal mammalian consumers. The problem is that all the Twite are to the south of here, so they have to have a pretty solid reliable incentive to come up here for the dawn feed - it would be a different matter if Heysham was on a 'commuter route' for wintering Twite. It is looking pretty bad with seemingly no semi-resident birds able to entice others from a communal night time roost as seemed to be the case in other years

Ad Med Gull followed the IOM ferry along the length of the harbour

The moth trap amazingly held December Moth and Mottled Umber after a NE gale. Bizarre!