Berry Head and Dawlish

A trip out to Brixham and thence to Berry Head, hoping for seabirds and perhaps a passage migrant or two.

Torbay from Berry Head

I got the train from Dawlish Warren to Paignton, then the bus over to Brixham. The coast was a bit quiet of birds — odd ones and twos of gulls and shags and a few pigeons at Dawlish — the river Teign was a bit more lively, with large numbers of oystercatchers and black-headed gulls.

Brixham Harbour

On Brixham Harbour there were plenty of gulls but no rock pipits (these were more thin on the ground that usual at Dawlish Warren, too). A seal bobbed up just by the "Do not feed the seals" sign then swam off between the boats.

Great black-backed gull

Instead of following the road round to Berry Head fort I took the woodland shortcut that climbs straight up. My good knee is telling me in no uncertain terms that it didn't enjoy all those steps. My dodgy knee is being ominously quiet. There's a packet of Anadin with my name on it. A small mixed tit flock was working its way through the woods.

Berry Head

After a cup of tea at the café in the fort I went down into the hide overlooking the cliffs to see what was about. There were plenty of jackdaws, pigeons and herring gulls and there were shags on the little rocky islets but no guillemots aside from a few flying low over the open water away from the cliffs. According to the board in the hide a couple of hundred had been on the cliffs the previous day.

I left the hide after the other occupants' discussion of the number of carriages on the main road out of Newport got too exciting. So I sat on a bench in the sun on top of a cliff, half-wondering why there weren't any fulmars while watching a large flock of gannets taking advantage of a pod of dolphins' attacking a school of fish.

Gannet

Gannet (? second calendar year)

Gannets

Gannet

Gannet

The only passage migrants I managed to bump into were a small flock of swallows flying out into the English Channel and a few red admiral butterflies.

Walking back I wondered what an odd shape was in the trees by the path. It turned out to be a buzzard.

Buzzard

I walked off the worst of the aching knee by getting off the train back at Dawlish and walking along the seawall back to Dawlish Warren. The tide was coming in and one of the juvenile shags was fishing quite close to the seawall.

Juvenile shag

I wondered about the thin black line in the water about a mile out, it turned out to be a raft of over two hundred eiders and common scoters settling down for the night over the mussel beds.

Eiders