Our monthly WeBS count should have been done a couple of weeks ago although, with weekends from mid-March through to mid-September fairly well occupied, this morning was the first chance I’d had to do the count.\u00a0 With today’s tide times, and a mid-morning meeting with a potential sponsor for NEWT, I left the house just after 6am and drove to Cresswell.\u00a0 Our usual method of covering the 3.75 miles of our survey section is to take 2 cars, leave one at East Chevington and then drive to Cresswell in the other, leaving us with a walk north along Druridge Bay.\u00a0 As a solo survey it’s a 7.5 mile round journey, and good exercise on the sand.\u00a0 As I headed north on a deserted beach, the southwesterly wind brought icy, stinging rain.\u00a0 Nearly 100 Common Eiders were just offshore, 5 Common Scoter were just beyond them and a summer-plumaged Red-throated Diver brought a splash of colour.\u00a0 A Sand eel had managed to become stranded almost 20m above the receding tideline so I did my good deed for the day and returned it to the sea, although it initially resisted my efforts to pick it up \ud83d\ude42\u00a0 Sandwich Terns were flying backwards and forwards along the shore, giving their creaky, rasping call, and a summer-plumaged Sanderling was feeding alongside 2 Ringed Plovers.<\/p>\n
With legs stretched and lungs filled with clean sea air I finished my walk and headed home.\u00a0 All the while I was thinking about my early birdwatching days when I would get up before dawn and cycle to what I’d identified as promising local birdwatching spots.\u00a0 Sometimes they produced the goods, sometimes they didn’t…but there was always that sense of having the world to yourself.\u00a0 Sometimes, birdwatching in Northumberland can feel like that in the middle of the day \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Our monthly WeBS count should have been done a couple of weeks ago although, with weekends from mid-March through to mid-September fairly well occupied, this morning was the first chance I’d had to do the count.\u00a0 With today’s tide times, and a mid-morning meeting with a potential sponsor for NEWT, I left the house just […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,9,5],"tags":[221,67,69,224,222,80,223],"class_list":["post-486","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-birdwatching","category-druridge","category-northumberland","tag-common-eider","tag-common-scoter","tag-red-throated-diver","tag-ringed-plover","tag-sand-eel","tag-sanderling","tag-sandwich-tern"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/486","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=486"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/486\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":491,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/486\/revisions\/491"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=486"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=486"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=486"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}