SLAVS AND BAR-TAILS

Friday 9th started off with freezing fog and only improved marginally as the day progressed. An hours walk along the seawall between the East Mersea Youth Camp and the Coopers Beach caravan site produced one or two highlights. Luckily the tide was coming in and a good selection of waders were feeding on the mud up to about 50 metres from the seawall. This section of seawall gets the full force of the sea against it at high tides and its concrete face is the nearest Mersea has to a rocky coastline.

All sorts of typical sounds came from the mud with the whistling curlews, the piping oystercatchers, the mournful grey plovers all getting restless to fly to their roosts with redshank, dunlin and turnstones. A group of 45 bar-tailed godwits picked and probed the mud with their long straight bills. Their pale plumage matched the grey brown surroundings except for one stunning bird in bright russet summer plumage. Recent mild weather must have confused its body clock.

Out at sea there were two pairs of slavonian grebes which for once outnumbered any great crested grebes on show. The slavonians were probably 2-300 metres offshore and both pairs were diving regularly with the incoming tide.

At the Youth Camp 25 moorhens fed on the waterlogged field, 10 blackbirds perched in the trees as did the great spotted woodpecker and the sound of one or two goldfinches jollied up the area. No sign of the regular little owl and no small birds around a wild bird crop although a pair of stock doves sat on some wires overhead.