a good blow

Finally a whole day of south-westerlies! Very sunny this am so I convinced myself that work was a better plan than burnt-out retinas! By lunchtime I'd heard from PM that there were big shears going by so I had a nervous wait all afternoon, hoping he wasn't going to do another bulwer's on me!

Walking up at half past five for an evening session I met PM heading back to the car but the prospect of me doing a triple fea's on him was too much and he turned round to do another couple of hours.

Its always a good omen when almost the first bird through the scope is a cory's shearwater! They kept coming too, steadily with occasional runs of 5 or 6 birds going through together. Magic! Great shearwaters were going by a bit less often and generally further out, so were harder to pick out in the blustery conditions. Good numbers of both were going by further out but the light and sea conditions meant scanning closer in was the better option.

By the end of the 3 hour watch numbers had crept up to 366 cory's shearwaters and 112 great shearwaters, with 13 sooty shearwaters, an adult (ahem) pomarine long-tailed skua (new for year 108), bonxie, 20 storm petrels and an arctic tern - kwality seawatching!

surprise seawatch

Headed out for a seawatch this evening, mainly to escape the kids, but also as the wind was looking like it might possibly be ok-ish. So it was a bit of surprise to get 5 cory's shearwaters go past in the first 30 seconds. But they kept on coming, sometimes really close in, and sometimes pretty distant but a steady procession. At times, they even outnumbered the manxies! Every so often there'd be a smattering of great shearwaters go through, although these were mostly more distant than the cory's. A juv long-tailed skua was another surprise, with reasonable numbers of  bonxies & sooties too. Final scores as follows:

800 cory's shearwaters

57 great shearwaters

1 long-tailed skua

13 sooties

10 bonxies

1 arctic skua

10 stormies

19 puffins

3 arctic terns