Another nice day, so we headed up to Newport/Nevern estuary this morning, having not been up that way for ages (possibly since last spring!).
Among the usual waterfowl were c.50 wigeon, 70-80 teal including the green-winged. Other birds included at least 5 little egrets, a greenshank, several redshanks, curlews and snipe and a fine male goosander that drifted down the river above the Iron Bridge.
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| A nice bird anyway, even if its taxonomic status has changed back to subspecies again |
A mixture of typical gulls included herring, lesser black-back, great black-back, black-headed, a few Med. gull and around 70-80 common gulls. One of the 2CY common gulls was colour-ringed white left leg. It was too far away to read the digits from photos taken, although the sequence possibly started with 11. Sadly, there is no Sam Baxter up there anymore. He recorded many common gull colour rings at Newport over the years.
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| Hopefully someone has managed to get a better view of this ones colour-ring |
In the afternoon, we went down to Fishguard, where we noted
a couple of great northern divers inside the harbour. Quite a few auks were feeding
inside the harbour and out in the bay, including at least 20+ razorbills and
around 50 guillemots. A single great crested grebe and a dozen or more gannets
were also feeding with a flock of cormorants. Around 15 or so turnstones were busy
feeding along the shore with a couple of ringed plovers and a redshank.
Med gulls were quite numerous. We noted around 30, but that was
probably an underestimate. George Mee arrived just before we left to look for
the ring-billed gull again, which we (and others present at the time)
had not seen. Hopefully, it put in appearance later on. Common gulls were
reasonably numerous, including a white-ringed immature spotted by George. A photo was
taken of this one too, but it was too far away to determine any of the digits. Its colour-ring was on the right leg, so it was not the Newport bird seen earlier.