Southport

Another nice day so I thought I'd go over to Crossens and Marshside on a late-Winter goose chase.

Although it provides a nice unbroken backdrop for backlit daffodils I'm still not altogether sure of the point of grubbing up nearly all the hawthorn hedging along Marshside Road.

As usual walking down Marshside Road this time of year there were large numbers of teal and wigeon, with plenty of shovelers and both Canada and greylag geese. Gadwalls and tufted ducks were less obvious and pintails were notably thin on the ground. A couple of small islands were thick with black-tailed godwits and near the margins of the Junction Pool were the first couple of avocets I've seen here this year.

Black-tailed godwits, Marshside

A couple of hundred pink-footed geese flew in and landed on the marsh. A male kestrel hovering over the car park was the first raptor of the day.

I didn't spot the golden plovers on Marshside until something, probably a merlin, spooked them.

I couldn't see what was spooking the plovers, whatever it was did it four times over the space of an hour. The only merlin I could see was a large female sat on one of the fence posts over the road on Crossens Outer Marsh. A buzzard was perched on a post quite far out in the salt marsh and a female kestrel flew along the road and over towards the waterworks.

Merlin, Crossens Outer Marsh

Pink-footed geese, Crossens Outer Marsh

All told there were a thousand or more pink-footed geese scattered across Marshside and Crossens Marsh. A couple of pink-footed geese on Crossens Outer Marsh had orange tones to their legs that made me look at them twice in the hopes I could turn them into bean geese. They weren't but I found a tundra bean goose a couple of minutes later a bit further out in the long grass. I also managed to spot a couple of barnacle geese amongst a distant group of Canada geese but I had no joy finding any flavour of either brent or white-fronted geese (the Facebook groups have had some nice photos of grey-bellied and dark-bellied brents and both Greenland and Russian white-fronts this week).

A rather fidgety water pipit amongst the meadow pipits and pied wagtails near the wildfowlers' pull-up brought the year list up to 123.