Redcar

Herring gulls, a great black-back, turnstones and a drake common eider

I thought I'd get the Transpennine Express to Redcar to do a bit of seawatching and use up the travel vouchers they gave me when they cancelled the trains on the last two attempts. You'll never guess what…

Luckily I was very early for the cancelled train so I could get the Newcastle train and change at Darlington for the local stopping train to Redcar. There's rail works at Stalybridge so the train was diverted via Sowerby Bridge, giving me a chance to put the nature reserve at Cromwell Bottom on my radar. I keep seeing reports from there, now I know where it is. The on-train birdwatching was consistent, mostly woodpigeons and corvids with plenty of gulls — black-headed near the tops and lesser black-backs over the lowlands — and nearly every mile of canal had its pair of Canada geese. There was a decent smattering of buzzards and kestrels and a red kite just outside Mirfield, these days it's not often I pass through this stretch of Yorkshire without seeing one.

Herring gulls

Sanderlings and herring gulls

It was high tide at Redcar beach and the weather was gloomy and windy but dry and surprisingly mild. A few dozen herring gulls loafed on the rocks by the lifeboat station with a great black-back and a couple of common eiders. Turnstones skittered all over the rocks and the steps at the base of the sea wall while sanderlings ran around the remaining sand like clockwork mice and a few redshanks foraged in the rock pools. An oystercatcher flew in to join the loafing crowd while a couple of others flew by. 

The sea was choppy and the tide was on the turn and I struggled to see anything sitting on the sea so I walked down the beach avoiding the roosting birds but constantly tripping over turnstones. Some cormorants flew by a few hundred yards out to sea and further out I could see herring gulls fishing with their hover and lunge actions, one of them flew in carrying a dab and made sure to land well away from hungry mouths to eat its prize.

Redcar Mudstones 

Gryphaea fossils

The rocks here are of special scientific interest, the Redcar Mudstones, an odd sort of shale which weathers to look like somebody's laid tarmac over the top (perhaps I'm just too used to much older shales which have had time to become brittle, these are Liassic rocks from the bottom of the Jurassic period and most of my geology was with Palaeozoic rocks). Every so often I'd trip over a layer of ancient oyster beds full of Gryphaea, "the Devil's toenails."

Herring gulls, eiders and common scoters, honestly

Partway down the beach I picked out a raft of common scoters and at least one velvet scoter which obligingly stretched its wings so I could see a flash of white. Then I noticed that not all of the white flecks on top of the sea were foam and spray, there was a raft of eiders out in the distance. I wandered down the beach, what I was gaining by getting closer I was losing by elevation — I was getting fairly good, albeit still distant, views of the birds when they crested the waves but most of the time they were out of sight. The drake eiders were easy enough to pick out, the ducks were dark blobs and every so often I'd mistake a raft of scoters for duck eiders and vice versa. What looked like a duck velvet scoter was with the eiders and that complicated things a bit. The tide started to ebb, letting the ducks linger slightly longer on the crests and giving me more of a chance of seeing what I was looking at.

I'd just come to the conclusion I wasn't going to see the king eider despite its having been reported here an hour previously when I spotted a something. There were a few not-quite-white-not-quite-dark birds in the raft, first-Winter drakes in monochrome patchwork starting to get their adult colours. One of them wasn't quite right, having an all-dark body and a pale but not white head. From this distance it looked grey, which isn't a colour common eiders go in for in any plumage. Then I lost it again in the waves. I found it again ten minutes later and wasn't much the wiser until I caught a touch of a brownish red tint from the front of its head and it was gone again. If I hadn't had king eider on my radar this would have been a what on earth was that bird, definitely something I hadn't seen before but a puzzle. 

I convinced myself I was just stringing myself along with a bit of wishful thinking and spent five minutes looking at turnstones and sanderlings to reset mind and brain before going back to the eiders. The tide had taken them and the scoters further out but I could still pick them out when they bobbed up in the waves. Drake eiders? check… duck eiders? check… black-and-white young drake eiders? check… big dark dreadnought of a duck that's probably a velvet scoter? check… and one duck that was black at the back and pale at the front. I gave it an hour but that was my best sighting of my first king eider, definitely a job for a telescope, the bins just couldn't do it.

A bit of a disappointing encounter with my first lifer of the year but they all count. It brings my British list up to 296 and the year list up to 141, comfortably on target for 200 at the end of the year.

I put a spurt on and managed to catch the train back to Manchester, which was actually running and got us back there, albeit half an hour late. Along the way the intermittent patches of late Spring sunshine brought out rabbits and roe deers in the fields. It was nice to get the bogeyman off my back, to be honest I was getting more of a thing about not arriving in Redcar than I was about seeing the bird. It was good to get both.

Redcar beach