Redcar

Eiders

Transpennine Express have got a promotion on at the moment where old folk like me can buy tickets to distant parts for £20 if bought online before the day of travel. I thought I'd give it a go. There's a direct train to Redcar from Oxford Road which is very straightforward so I decided I'd go for a couple of hours' North Sea seawatching.

I got the train and we chugged along without incident. It was ferociously busy between Huddersfield and York, as usual, but I'd managed to get myself a window seat and I was settled down watching the landscape roll by. One thing's for certain, whatever's been going on in Greater Manchester there's no shortage of woodpigeons in North Yorkshire.

It had been grey and a bit misty in Manchester, I had an attack of optimism when the clouds parted over the Pennines with a milky sun, then it became grey and misty again after York. I didn't hold out much by any seawatching as I walked down to Redcar Beach from the station.

Redcar Beach 

The first thing I spotted on the beach, besides the passing black-headed gulls and herring gulls, was a knot of birdwatchers a couple of hundred yards beyond the seafront cinema. I looked over to where they were pointing and saw a raft of eiders bobbing round in the surf. I kept an eye on them both as I walked down, scanning round every so often to see if anything else was about and being rewarded with cormorants, oystercatchers and a passing razorbill. I wasn't far off the crowd when I found what they were looking at: a female long-tailed duck amongst the eiders. I'm rather tripping over long-tailed ducks at the moment, which is nice as they've been noticeably lacking the past couple of Winters. 

Eiders

Long-tailed duck

There were lots of herring gulls on the sea as well as a bunch of smaller, dark gulls which had me baffled for a few minutes. Luckily there were a couple more amongst the black-headed gulls and common gulls on the beach. There's hardly an Autumn these days where I don't get myself confused over first-Winter common gulls. A noisy bunch of oystercatchers joined the gulls and started feeding at the tideline. Sanderlings and redshanks flew by but didn't settle.

Common scoters

I walked further up, keeping an eye on the sea all the while. The distant flock of gulls in the mist around the wind turbines became a flock of herring gulls and a couple of rafts of common scoters as I got a closer look. The scoters seemed all to be female-type birds, I couldn't see any black drakes unless they were in the misty distance. A couple of the scoters were slightly set apart from the rafts and were bigger and broader of beam. It took me a while to be sure they were velvet scoters, I've only ever seen one before and that was on a bright, sunny day some years ago. 

Divers. The bird on the right is definitely a red-throated diver, the one in the middle is probably a red-throated diver, I'm not sure of the one on the left.

Then I spotted three larger birds a few hundred yards further out. It didn't take me long to be sure they were divers but which one(s)? I struck lucky as they floated in a bit. One was definitely a red-throated diver. One might have been one. One looked slightly bigger but I wasn't sure if it wasn't just a trick of perspective. I lost them in the swell of the waves and while I was trying to find them again I spotted yet another diver a bit further along and further out that was definitely bigger than a red-throated diver and a lot more black-and-white. A black-throated diver, I've never seen one close to and this one wasn't for coming any nearer to shore and soon disappeared into the mists at the base of the wind turbines. I'd have had more luck with a telescope but I concluded a couple of years ago that I'm too old for lugging a telescope with me on public transport. A chap with a telescope came by and I pointed out where I'd been seeing the divers and between us we found a couple of red-throated divers which might have been two of the trio I'd been looking at before.

The mist rolled in some more and the light got worse. I'd had a couple of hour's exercise and birdwatching and added a couple more to the year list so I called it a day and managed to get back to the station with five minutes to spare for the next train back to Manchester. All in all, not a bad trip out on a gloomy sort of day.

Redcar Beach