The tide was coming in strongly when we arrived at Littleferry this morning, rapidly inundating the shingle banks which are the favoured retreat of Loch Fleet's wading birds. One end of the main bank appeared mainly to be populated by....
....a flock of perhaps sixty oystercatchers but a closer look revealed a few of two other species, the slightly larger ones being redshanks. Further along the same bank....
....we could see a group which was exclusively redshanks while....
...on the next bank the main species....
....was ring-necked plovers. However, again, they were mixed in with at least two other species. One was more redshanks but the other, much the same size as the redshanks, had a black beak so might, possibly, be dunlin.
I don't think we've ever before observed such a mixing of wader species, nor had I expected that, when it came to 'abandoning the sinking ship', each species didn't act together but left it to the individual to decide when to move to drier land.
There were other birds on the loch including merganser and, on the far side, a flock of eider, and we also had....
....a close encounter with a separate flock of oystercatchers, so Loch Fleet was a bit of a treat today.
The tide was coming in strongly when we arrived at Littleferry this morning, rapidly inundating the shingle banks which are the favoured retreat of Loch Fleet's wading birds. One end of the main bank appeared mainly to be populated by....
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