Monday 31 October 2016

A sunset visit to the Landshipping Quay area

We had a very quick look at the Landshipping Quay area at sunset - a beautiful, calm, slightly misty evening.

Waterfowl roosting there, and just around the corner into Eastern Cleddau, included: 80-100 redshanks, 2 greenshanks, 500+ lapwings, several curlews, 12 dunlin, 1 curlew sandpiper, a black-tailed godwit (being hotly pursued by a hunting juvenile peregrine) plus numerous teal and wigeon.


Over on the opposite side of the Cleddau (Sprinkle Pill area) at least 2,000 black-headed gulls were coming into roost. The birds were too far away from our view point to determine if there were any other possibly interesting gulls roosting with them. There wasn't much evidence of the recent greylag flock over there this evening, but c. 20 flew over our garden in that general direction a few days ago.

A late-ish wheatear was a slightly unexpected bird at the Quay - possibly it was also preparing to roost nearby this evening. Several hundred starlings were heading over to Slebech reedbed, but numbers roosting over there are still probably fairly low.

Small flocks of redwings and fieldfares (including a flock of 50+ of the latter) were in evidence over the weekend between Martletwy and Cresswell Quay. A young male goshawk flew over Martletwy a few days ago - observed from our kitchen window. Its not the first one we've seen from the house by any means, but was nice to see anyway.