The Wirral

Red Rocks half an hour before high tide

Gave up on the cricket early enough to only catch the first two wickets. Set off to do the first seawatching of the year over on the Wirral. I was early for high tide so I stopped off at Moreton for a stroll round Leasowe Common. Lots of swallows about the paddocks in Kerr's Field but no sign of any of the stonechats that were there a while back. A very obliging buzzard posed for photographs.

Buzzard, Kerr's Field

Buzzard, Kerr's Field

A lot of dunlin, turnstones and ringed plovers on the beach with the gulls and little egrets.

Dunlins, Moreton Beach

Dunlins and little egret, Moreton Beach

Then over to Hoylake for a walk up to Red Rocks. A fairly low high tide today so everything was a bit distant but still managed to add kittiwake, gannet, Manx shearwater, bonxie and my first ever pomarine skua (a juvenile, I think) to the year list.

There were a lot of distant dark shapes flying past the wind turbines; statistically they were almost certainly juvenile lesser black backs — there were plenty of these kicking about. The bonxie was only half a mile out and high enough to be out of the heat haze. The pom was twenty minutes later and required a long process of elimination: roughly the same size as the juvenile lesser black-backs but a lot heftier and with a lot of chest about it but smaller and with more back end than the bonxie.

I only managed to see the shearwaters because they passed in front of a buoy. There were a lot of indistinct smudges moving through the heat haze which may have been more or could just have been shadows of waves.