Having taken several photos of the resting Golden Plover flock on Sprinkle Pill yesterday, opposite our shoreline view point near Brickyard, I decided to stitch them together in Lightroom. Six photos were used in the end to allow for sufficient overlap and to create a fairly reasonable, if rather narrow, panoramic view.
It took quite a while to go through an enlarged version of the photo on the computer screen, trying to eliminate shadows of birds in the mud etc and to work out how many there were in the denser huddles in the middle part of the image. After two counts - from left to right, and from right to left - I ended up with 4,569 and 4,671, so an estimate of 4,600 seems quite reasonable.
The view-point was ok, but would probably have been a bit better if it had been on a slightly higher elevation.
We wonder how many flocks there are in the county, e.g. around other parts of the Cleddau estuary, over at at Gupton/Castlemartin and in North Pembs at the moment?
Bob