Summertime seaside special

Juvenile herring gulls begging

It being a bank holiday I decided to go to the seaside. No really, there was a method to the madness. Given that Autumn seems to have arrived early I thought I'd go over to New Brighton, just in case the season might have arrived early there too. It stayed a nice Summer's day so I ended up just having a nice walk down the prom.

Herring gull

The tide had started to ebb so there were plenty of birds close in and on the breakwaters (just the one redshank on the pontoon by the cafés though). Nearly all were gulls, with a handful of redshanks and turnstones and a dozen starlings fussing about in the seaweed. A few cormorants flew in and loafed about on the breakwaters. And that was pretty much it.

There were still some very young herring gulls about including a pair that were insistently begging from one of their parents along the tideline.

One of the immature black-headed gulls bothered me because it was appreciably smaller than the other black-headed gulls around it. It turned out to be a good exercise in preparation for Winter gull watching. I knew the only other thing it could be would be a Bonaparte's gull so I went through the reasons why it couldn't be one:

• Although it was small for a black-headed it wasn't nearly small enough for a Bonaparte's.
• The bill was too long for a Bonaparte's and eventually I could make out the red base to it.
• In flight the black ends to the primaries and secondaries were thick and diffuse, a Bonaparte's would have had a thin, clear black trailing edge.
• The underwing of a Bonaparte's would be much cleaner with white primaries with a clean black trailing edge.
• The dark edges to the wing coverts were smudgy sooty brown, in a Bonaparte's they'd be cleaner and darker.

Immature black-headed gull

Immature black-headed gull

Adult and Immature black-headed gull

So a small black-headed gull it was then. Which I knew anyway but there's no harm in making sure of the identification of any gull that "isn't quite right."

I decided against moving on to Leasowe or West Kirby and opted instead for a slow meandering route home maxing out the value of the day ranger tickets and stopping over at Chester for an hour between trains. I was sat on Frodsham Street having my first cup of tea of the day when I noticed that the house martins were still visiting the nests up in the eaves of the card shop. The martins back in Stretford seem to have packed up in the last week or so.