Natural Selection

Jane wanted to look for seaglass this morning, so we ‘killed two birds with one stone’ and I did an hour seawatching from Rossall Promenade car park whilst she combed the beach below the tideline.

The basic test of successful seawatching is managing to look at the sea. In this regard I was a failure. Initially I got distracted by a hybrid Herring x Lesser Black-backed Gull. The handheld phone to scope shots aren’t world beaters but it looks like the bird that has been here for several years.

The bird called a few times and I tried to capture the long call position, whilst these aren’t great you can see that the angle of the head was around 45 degrees. Sources online suggest that Yellow-legged Gull and Lesser Black-backed Gull throw their head 90 degrees in the air and one site mentions another hybrid also only tilting its head half way back in the long call. I guess with hybrids it might be variable but it was interesting nevertheless.

On the occasions the gull flew inland I managed to get fascinated by the Turnstone that came to within a couple of feet of me, presumably because I wasn’t moving very much. They often hang around for fishermen’s scraps but this one was exceptionally close.

When I did manage to look at the sea there wasn’t a lot of movement, other than Cormorants, but there were a few bits. Birds included Red-throated Divers, Common Scoter and Eider, and there was also a seal bottling fairly close offshore.

I am conscious this blog was supposed to be partly about creative writing and has become a fairly standard birding diary. There is a piece I did about Jane and I visiting today’s beach in the spring, and I will put that on here tomorrow.