Sunday birding

An extremely low tide this morning coincided with me being in the flat with the time to stare at it. The low water meant that even we on the ground floor could see the nearside mud. By standing on the bed looking down through an overly heightened scope I was able to sift through waders with a little more ease than usual, although that depends how you define "ease". I was looking through around 50 dunlin and 4 ringed plover on the off chance I might relocate and flat-tick a little stint seen a couple of hundred metres downriver a few days when I found a sanderling, an excellent bird for Grays. If you're interested, it's the fifth sanderling I've had here, after a group of four seen on the far bank back in the autumn. Four turnstone spent the morning directly outside the flat, and three curlews, five grey plover, 25 teal and the usual hordes of lapwing and redshank made up the rest of a fairly productive if flat-tickless hour.

This afternoon I opted for the selfish option of birding, rather than hospital visiting. I went to Abberton.

Up north, relatively, there's still a lot more snow than there is in Grays, with some roads still covered. Made for some exciting driving.

As usual I stopped first at the Layer Breton causeway, where I failed utterly to find the long-tailed duck, any smew, or any scaup amongst the hordes of shovelers, wigeon, teal, and that disgusting chinese swan goose thing from last time. I checked twitter and thanks to the magic of mobulate phonterwebs and the generosity of its users I soon left for Abberton Church, where the long-tailed duck was fairly quick and easy to locate. Thanks, by the way, to the guy who drove ahead so I could follow him there... Views were distant and brief; for every four seconds it spent on the surface it spent a minute or two under water. It did spend all its time in the one area though, making picking it up after each dive easy. This is the nearest thing I have to a photo of a long-tailed duck at Abberton; a very confused long-tailed duck I found just inside Blakeney Point a few Mays ago.

This all seems a very, very long time ago.

After seeing the long-tail, an Essex tick, no less, and a bird I didn't see at all last year, I toured the reservior looking for open water. There were loads of goldeneye and a few goosander but they didn't nearly make up for being the only birder in the east of the UK who didn't see a smew this weekend. However, taking advantage of it being a Sunday, parking in a works entrance and viewing from the closed causeway easily made up for it as I located two scaup out on the main body of the reservior. Scaup are brilliant, one of those "if you think it's one, it's not" birds.

Not coots.

Back at Layer Breton, the apparently regular barn owl was in it's usual bush, with a hen harrier sitting nearby and three short eared owls in their regular field. From the old visitor centre drive I had a couple of white-fronted geese hanging around with some greylags out on the ice and a huge flock of skylarks.

Two of three distant shorties in there somewhere...

And then I went home. The end.

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I took the camera out today for some more thorough testing. It's definitely borked, though inconsistently so. Sometimes it was like this:

Acceptable.

And then others, it was like this:

Unacceptable.

Arse.