Wirral

Raven, Meols

I had planned to go over to the Wirral yesterday before I got sidetracked with the phalarope so I headed that way today. The weather looked fitful but the wind was good for blowing seabirds close in as the tide rolled in. 

On the way over I checked what had been reported over there and found that a Baird's sandpiper had been reported on the beach near the RNLI station at Hoylake the past couple of days. There were no reports today so like as not it had moved on but it made sense to start a walk at that end of the path and have the sun and wind mostly behind me. Even if there had been a hundred reports the likelihood of my seeing and recognising a rare peep was pretty minimal anyway.

(It's probably worth explaining why I have even more problems with small sandpipers than I do gulls. The dunlin is the archetypal small wader the same way that the herring gull is the archetypal large gull and they vary even more, especially on passage when they're transitioning from a breeding plumage of rich brown upperparts and black belly to Winter's grey brown upperparts and white belly. We have two subspecies commonly on our shores, birds from the high Arctic (alpina) with long bills and birds from Western Europe and Southern Scandinavia (schinzii) that are slightly smaller with shorter beaks. And, of course, there's subtle individual variation. So I need a good view — and ideally somebody around with prior experience — before I'm confident of identifying something that isn't obviously structurally different to a dunlin. In this case Baird's sandpiper has longer wings than a dunlin but I don't know how obvious this looks in the field.)

Juvenile pied wagtail, Hoylake

I got off at Manor Road Station and walked down to the promenade. The wind was strong and gusty as I walked down the road and got stronger and gustier as I approached the prom. Out in the open, hanging onto the railings to try and steady myself, it was blowing a hooley. Dozens of pied wagtails fussed about on the beach, mercifully mostly close by so the wind vibrating my binoculars wasn't much of an issue. Looking further out the shelducks and herring gulls sitting on the mud were mostly white blurs and had the curlews not called they would have been indeterminate dark shapes.

Pied wagtails, Hoylake
The wagtails had more sense than me and kept to shelter

There were also dozens of linnets. I generally only saw them when a small group of half a dozen or so flew from one clump of vegetation to another. Most of the time they stayed undercover in the tussocks, venturing out every so often to raid the seed heads of sea plantains. I nearly missed the couple of rock pipits, thinking they were more linnets in the grass. Luckily for me they had a quarrel and bounced out into the open before running back to their separate corners. Every so often a flash of green would catch my eye as a juvenile pied wagtail still sporting the primrose yellow cast of childhood blew past. A young white wagtail a little further out stood out from the nearby selection of juvenile pied wagtails but was impossible to get into focus in this wind. I managed to get some photos of nearby pied wagtails by using myself as a windbreak, even so most had a lot of camera shake about them.

Hoylake beach

I walked along a bit then sat down by the tennis courts so I could brace myself against the wind, though I lost some visibility due to the railings. The tide was starting to turn, it was about an hour and a half before high tide. Cormorants flew above the surf and groups of herring gulls and lesser black-backs loafed on the distant mud. Closer in a few black-headed gulls rummaged about in the tussocks and a couple of common gulls loafed behind what cover they could find against the wind.

Juvenile ringed plover, Hoylake

It wasn't until I got to the end of the tennis courts that I started seeing waders on the mud, redshanks at first then I started being able to pick out ringed plovers and dunlins as they dashed about like clockwork mice. I had another sit down and saw more of them further out, mostly just distant dark shapes until they took flight to move between patches of mud. A grey plover proved surprisingly easy to identify with its long, dark legs and once I found one I found half a dozen, most of them sporting bits of black underpants to make it easier. The knots were harder, I could only reliably identify a couple of them. 

As if the wind wasn't bad enough the clouds blew in and the visibility became distinctly murky. If there was a Baird's sandpiper out there I wasn't going to be the one seeing it. At the end of the tennis courts a couple of birdwatchers had parked up and were sitting in their cars with their telescopes which seemed an eminently sensible idea. We let on and wished each other luck. I tried to find some lee in the wall of the tennis courts but the angles offered no shelter from the wind. After half an hour I gave up on it. A serious birdwatcher would have stuck it out but I'm not a serious birdwatcher, I'm a bloke what goes out birdwatching.

Raven, Meols

As I walked along Meols Promenade in the dim light and the near-horizontal rain a raven kept me company part of the way, hanging in the wind a few feet above the railings before dipping and rolling and coming back to hang above the railings. After a couple of minutes of this it dipped back into the wind, did a victory roll and glided into the wind in the direction of the lifeboat station. I never not marvel at ravens' mastery of the air and the sheer joy they seem to have in flying.

Raven, Meols

More birdwatchers turned up with telescopes hopeful of the incoming tide. I walked on, I'd been concerned that I'd overdressed for the day and was now needing to keep moving to stop the joints getting cold in them as the wind and rain got heavier. More dunlins and ringed plovers skittered about and small flocks of them rose and fell in the distant mud.

I was about halfway down the prom when a flock of about a dozen dunlins about a hundred yards out caught my eye. They rose and fell then rose and fell again, never seeming to settle and after a couple of minutes they flew off towards Hoylake. One of the birds struck me as being different. It was darker somehow from above and instead of the usual distinct white wingbar it was more diffuse, almost a pale wash across the base of the flight feathers. But it was the beak that struck me, it was slightly shorter than the other birds' and had that stick-stuck-in-a-spud look that I associate with plovers and knots. Was this the Baird's? Was this just a particularly short-billed schinzii in a group of alpina? The nearest of the other birders was a few hundred yards away upwind and the flock had flown by the time I had the wit to think about trying to shout over. So I'll never know. Which happens more often than I tend to let on.

From Meols Promenade 

I walked on a bit further and the heavens opened. I looked out to sea to see if this was just a passing shower and saw that we were guaranteed at least half an hour of pure filth. I called it a day and squelched my way into Meols for the train. I'd had a bit of a walk and a bit of birdwatching and I'd exercised my observation skills a tad and there was no point in being silly about it.