…here’s the Bonxies.<\/p>\n
Watching the weather forecast during the week, and having a day on Holy Island <\/a>on Thursday with Malcolm (trip report to come soon!), convinced me that there was somewhere I needed to be at dawn on Friday.\u00a0 Arriving at Church Point in the half-light there were a few cars already parked, and a wander along to the point with Mike H found the owners of those cars already intently scanning the angry-looking sea.\u00a0 Andy McL, Tim C., Eric B., David D. and Jimmy S. were all clustered around the ‘seawatching hut’.<\/p>\n It would be good to be able to report that I’m thoroughly domesticated and house-trained and, after the few hours I’d planned to spend seawatching, I went home, via the supermarket to do the grocery shopping, and did all of the housework.\u00a0 However, back in what Sarah refers to as ‘the world according to Martin’ that couple of hours to see if there was any movement of seabirds turned into a plan to stay until 12:00…then mid-afternoon…and finally, as the light faded to the point where you could hallucinate the sort of sightings that Ellington’s second best birdwatcher<\/a> * was enjoying a few miles to the north<\/a> of us, I gave up just after 18:00.\u00a0 11 hours on Church Point, but a not-too-shabby day list;<\/p>\n Black Guillemot<\/strong><\/em> 1<\/p>\n Great Crested Grebe<\/strong><\/em> 1<\/p>\n Pale-bellied Brent Goose<\/strong><\/em> 20<\/p>\n Dark-bellied Brent Goose<\/strong><\/em> 2<\/p>\n Long-tailed Duck<\/strong><\/em> 4<\/p>\n Goldeneye<\/strong><\/em> 9<\/p>\n Velvet Scoter<\/strong><\/em> 15<\/p>\n Shoveler<\/strong> <\/em>24<\/p>\n Red-throated Diver<\/strong><\/em> 24<\/p>\n Black-throated Diver<\/strong><\/em> 3<\/p>\n Great Northern Diver<\/strong><\/em> 7<\/p>\n Manx Shearwater<\/strong><\/em> 53<\/p>\n Sooty Shearwater<\/strong><\/em> 62<\/p>\n Balearic Shearwater<\/strong><\/em> 2<\/p>\n Great Skua<\/strong><\/em> 261<\/p>\n Pomarine Skua<\/strong><\/em> 3<\/p>\n Long-tailed Skua<\/strong><\/em> 3<\/p>\n Arctic Skua<\/strong><\/em> 8<\/p>\n Red-breasted Merganser<\/strong><\/em> 7<\/p>\n Little Gull<\/strong><\/em> 3<\/p>\n Arctic Tern<\/strong><\/em> 1<\/p>\n ‘blue’ Fulmar<\/strong> <\/em>12<\/p>\n Short-eared Owl<\/strong><\/em> 1<\/p>\n *Ellington’s best birdwatcher is, and it really goes without saying, Iain’s better half, Janet \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" …here’s the Bonxies. Watching the weather forecast during the week, and having a day on Holy Island on Thursday with Malcolm (trip report to come soon!), convinced me that there was somewhere I needed to be at dawn on Friday.\u00a0 Arriving at Church Point in the half-light there were a few cars already parked, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,105],"tags":[362,230,596,431,150,497,173,168,488,151,363,93,68,498,364,108,387,188,69,322,456,365,595],"class_list":["post-2106","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-birdwatching","category-north-sea","tag-arctic-skua","tag-arctic-tern","tag-balearic-shearwater","tag-black-guillemot","tag-black-throated-diver","tag-blue-fulmar","tag-dark-bellied-brent-goose","tag-goldeneye","tag-great-crested-grebe","tag-great-northern-diver","tag-great-skua","tag-little-gull","tag-long-tailed-duck","tag-long-tailed-skua","tag-manx-shearwater","tag-pale-bellied-brent-goose","tag-pomarine-skua","tag-red-breasted-merganser","tag-red-throated-diver","tag-seawatching","tag-short-eared-owl","tag-sooty-shearwater","tag-velvet-scoter"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2106","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2106"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2106\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2107,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2106\/revisions\/2107"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2106"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2106"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2106"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}