WeBS Weekend

Yesterday I had a walk along the estuary from Passage House to Coombe Cellars in the pouring rain in the hope of seeing some good gulls, but the best I could do was three probable intermedius Lesser Black-backed Gulls and a possible distant argentatus Herring Gull.

When the rain finally stopped, there was a magical moment as the rain departed and the sun came out.

Sadly this did not point to an American Herring Gull!

I then had a look at the racecourse. Can you find the Kingfisher in this picture?

There's also four Snipe

Today, Will and I did the WeBS count. We met up at 8:15 and headed to the fields south of Bishopsteignton where we found some nice Cirl Buntings.

Don't know why some of the twigs have turned blue!

The Jacks Patch car park (entrance to Flow Point) was closed until 10:30 so we when to count the Turnstones on The Salty. There were 11 roosting on the boats. No sign of any divers or grebes on the water though.

Offshore, there were two Great Northern Divers, a flying diver sp. off Exmouth, a Great Crested Grebe, and an oily looking Razorbill.

On to Flow Point, we counted 391 Oystercatchers, 51 Curlew, 9 Ringed Plover, 1 Dunlin (first for the year), and 21 Red-breasted Mergansers (males all displaying now).

At Passage House, we quickly found the two Avocet which were reported earlier in the week. They are annual on the Teign but are always nice to see. A total of 90 Redshank and 10 Greenshank were on the estuary, roughly half of each roosted at Flow. The Lapwing count stood at 29, the Little Grebe at 12, and the Common Sandpipers at three (a good winter count).

So, over the weekend, we managed five additions to the year list, which you can find in the 2014 year list tab at the top of the page.