Off A Duck's Back

There’d been a day or two without birding so I set the alarm clock on the strength of Thursday night’s forecast. It was raining hard at 5am so I dozed off for a while. Not long after something stirred me from slumber and the rain had relented, at least for an hour or two. By 0930 a threatening shower had turned again to more persistent rain so play was abandoned for the day after less than two hours of fun. 

A quick stop at Conder Green confirmed a Common Tern sat tight on a nest while two minutes later at Glasson the male was on his circuit. While the female Common Tern sits tight on the nest at Conder Green, the male Common Tern flies off to a regular tour of Glasson Dock 800 yards away where the preferred food seems both readily available and fairly easy to catch. 

The male starts with a round or two of the yacht basin, where it sometimes rests on a tiny but distant jetty, followed by a short flight to the dock where it quickly catches a small fish of the required size. He immediately heads directly back to Conder Green where he presents the fish to the sitting female. 

Both the dock and the yacht basin appear to be teeming with fish at the moment, food availability being a likely factor in the terns choosing to nest so late in the season. The pool at Conder Green seems to lack both the amount and availability of food on offer at Glasson Dock, but has the advantage of an island with the required structure of vegetation that is relatively safe from predators. 

Common Tern

The early rain had mostly kept people indoors but the dock was in noisy working mode with no sign of the regular Kingfisher amongst the boats and moorings. The late start meant less Swallows too, a count of 40ish being considerably down from recent ones. Eight or more Swifts overhead and 8 Cormorants heading south. 

Swallow

 Cormorant

Tufted Ducks numbered just 16 today, the picture below taken from the car when the rain started again and water droplets rolled off the proverbial duck’s back. 

Tufted Duck

A walk along the canal proved fairly fruitful until the rain called a halt. There’s an old neglected orchard with apple trees and fruiting plants like Blackcurrant and where I found 3 brown-headed Blackcaps, 3 or more Robins and several each of Blackbirds, Chaffinches and Goldfinches, 2 Song Thrush, and a Sedge Warbler in song. The regular Tawny Owl was there too, hidden in the dense trees and extensive cover where the scolding of Blackbirds and Song Thrush gave the game away. 

Robin

Further along the canal were 8 Tree Sparrow, and hiding in the waterside vegetation a minimum of 6 Reed Warbler, 4 Sedge Warbler, 2 Whitethroat and 1 Willow Warbler. It’s the time of year that a birder has to use ears rather than eyes to locate the tiny “brown jobs” flitting unseen before their very eyes. 

Whitethroat

Real rain had arrived so I “birded” as best I could from the car at Conder Green with counts of 145 Redshank, 4 Common Sandpiper, 8 Black-tailed Godwit, 3 Dunlin and 3 Little Egret in the immediate channels. 

It was no good, even with the car window partly down everything was getting a soaking. Time to save it for Another Day on Another Bird Blog.

Linking today to Anni's Blog, Camera Critters and Eileen's Saturday .