The only movement today was still!

The wind moved back to SSE and became quite fresh, not cold though. Light rain on and off all day.

First an update from Wednesday from Middleton Nature Reserve 

Woodcock 1 flushed from western marsh

I mentioned there was a lot of landscaping going on on the western scrape. This is part of the excellent result of that work.

A clear corridor through the reeds, looks very promising
both for the wildlife and the opportunity to see it. Picture from Alan

Mediterranean gull 1 in the lower horse paddock near the children's play area 

Pale-bellied Brent goose 10 - they were feeding on the gut weed out from the play area (just where I photographed it yesterday - see yesterday's post), c2.5 hours before high water. Although all 10 were quite happy together while not feeding, as soon as they reached the weed beds a group of 6 (including the red/blue ringed Canadian birds) would not tolerate the other 4 feeding on the same, presumably best, location.

This shot gives a nice sense of the conditions and the demarcation 

This shot is from the sea wall as I was leaving, the large rocks in the foreground 
is the play area breakwater. Just in front of the birds is the lusher area of gut weed,
but they didn't get that far, when I looked back a few minutes later (14:00) they were flying 
off to the south. Don't know where they went, but they didn't turn up at Red Nab

The only sign of "movement" today was this Song Thrush having a rest out of the wind,
on the sloping sea wall between the outflows

There are 5 Oystercatcher back on the football pitch next to the cricket field 
This shows today's location, that's the gate post nearest the car park.
The flagged bird was just extracting  a worm. They do seem to find them easily.
I wonder how many they eat in a day? 

On Tuesday I mentioned that the local Carrion Crow also open mussels by dropping them, onto a hard surface. Janet duly obliged by photographing this one in action.