A Day Late...

I wish I had had time to go down to the sea front and look over the waves yesterday afternoon/evening, because Sooty Shearwaters were passing the south coast en masse. Portland had 60 and Start Point over 300!  I'm pretty sure I would have been rewarded with a patch record count if I'd given it time, but I reckon even if I had a spare half an hour I would have seen some Sooty action.  What a pain in the arse!

To try and compensate I was out at 7am this morning, and sea watched for an hour from 07:08 from the Spot On Kiosk.  Annoyingly the conditions weren't that great...

Blue sky and small waves = not good for sea watching

I'm pleased to say though I did manage a Sooty Shearwater! YEAH! :-)  The views weren't great as I got on it late, but it was at a pretty good distance for here so it wasn't all that bad.  It came by pretty much bang on 8am.  It was nice to see four Red-throated Divers too, three of which flew through west, and the fourth looked to be doing the same until it plonked down on the sea infront of me.  My first of the autumn.

So anyway, the full totals of this watch were (all west):

1 Common Scoter

4 Red-throated Diver

110 Gannet

1 Sooty Shearwater

9 Balearic Shearwater

2 Kittiwake

2 Auk sp.

So although I did see a few bits, I basically 'did a Josh'. (That's a new phrase meaning 'to miss a good seawatch').

Don't know why I'm bothering to post this, but I like Gulls, and I really like Lesser Black-backed Gulls, so this little group on Black Hole Marsh in my opinion deserve the effort of going up here...

You probably won't agree though!