Thursday 20 February 2020

Counting gulls

Lade - cold, cloudy, sw 5 - Another nippy old morning with a scudding wind out of the west; not ideal for counting gulls, but nothing ventured nothing gained, so`s to speak. With short tides I counted on the ebb from opposite Lade boardwalk, around the bay to Littlestone using a combination of counting blocks of 100 and multiplying, and photographing distant sections that I then magnified on the laptop and added to the tally. The result: 13,000 gulls, give or take 500 each way. However, there were, perhaps, a thousand more birds along the foreshore from the boardwalk towards the Pilot, and no doubt many more were lurking out of sight around the Dungeness cuspate, so the true figure could easily be in excess of 20,000 gulls.
 


                                Some of the thousands of bay gulls

                               And more towards Dungeness

                                Assistant gull counter!

  As for the species balance I would say that 75% were Black-headed and Common Gulls with 20% Herring Gulls, and the remainder a mix of the two Black-backs and Mediterranean Gulls. A lone Brent Goose was also noted and a small flock of Sanderlings. The predominant shellfish on the strandline was Cockle, while a few Lesser-spotted Dogfish and Barrel Jellyfish were also washed up.



                               What`s not to like about Sanderlings!


                                Lesser-spotted Dogfish

                                Barrel Jellyfish

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