Given the choice of the many walks we have from our house I am always drawn to the one along the coast to the north of the village simply because it hosts more wildlife than any other in the area. To add to this, this morning's weather was superb, sunny, warm and windless, and the tide was perfect, rising after a low at 7.00 this morning.
Today's walk was nominated by the bird life. The common and black-headed gulls were concentrating on food floating on the water, something we've seen before without being able to identify what it is. In amongst the gulls, and along the shore, I spotted curlews, oystercatchers, black-backed and herring gulls, cormorants, redshanks and....
....bar-tailed godwits, four this time, suggesting they might stay with us. However, what interested me most were....
....the sandwich terns, both adults like this one and....
....juveniles. Some were diving into the water - something we've seen too little of recently - indicating they are finding food.
They'll be heading south shortly and we'll be missing their screeching cry along the beach.
Twice while I was watching the terns they were harassed by a medium-sized, dark but very agile gull, which selected one of the terns and chased it in a spectacular show of aerobatics, pursued by three or four very angry terns, all accompanied by much screaming. The action - presumably an attempt to get the tern to disgorge any food it had caught - was far too fast for me so....
....the only picture I got of the attacker was this, just enough to suggest that it was a skua, perhaps the dark variety of Arctic skua, a bird whose conservation status is red.
Given the choice of the many walks we have from our house I am always drawn to the one along the coast to the north of the village simply because it hosts more wildlife than any other in the area. To add to this, this morning's weather was superb, sunny, warm and windless, and the tide was perfect, rising after a low at 7.00 this morning.
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