Lade - warm, dry and sunny- Having spent most of the past week doing family stuff it felt good to get out around the local patch with Ted first thing morning, mercifully in cooler weather conditions courtesy of cloud cover and a northerly airflow. The water levels continue to drop due to the drought revealing several long islands over by the wall `mirror` that attracted a host of gulls, ducks, Common Terns and Cormorants alongside 18 Little and two Great White Egrets with a further eight Littles elsewhere across the site. South lake delivered large numbers of waterfowl including hundreds of Pochard, Tufted Duck, Shoveler, Gadwall, Mallard and Coot, 50 Great Crested Grebe, 150 Black-headed and 50 Mediterranean Gulls with another couple of hundred diving ducks on north lake. Several Common Sandpipers zipped over the lakes and a Greenshank passed high overhead calling. In the sheltered ponds area passage Willow, Reed and Sedge Warblers, Common and Lesser Whitethroats were plentiful.
Next stop was ARC from Hanson hide where passage waders included three Little Ringed Plovers, a Common Sandpiper and a Dunlin amongst many more common wildfowl, gulls, Cormorants, grebes plus a flight view of a Bittern. (I called in on the reserve on Wednesday where Black-tailed Godwit, Greenshank and Green Sandpiper were noted on Burrowes plus a juvenile Black Tern from Firth lookout, Garganey and Greenshank from Hanson).
Moving onto Kerton quarry where a large flock of gulls contained 20 Mediterranean Gulls, 30 Sandwich Terns and 120 roosting Oystercatchers from the viewpoint, while over 200 Curlews and a Whimbrel flew to roost out on the Desert.
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