Wow what a morning! I just knew that the elegant tern would be at Formby after two consecutive no-shows at Hightown, and Formby was exactly where I wanted to see it most.
I arrived at 9:30am, about 3 hours before high tide and immediately found a
flock of at least 2,500 Sandwich terns on the beach at the end of Lifeboat
road. The light was perfect and there was hardly any wind compared with the
force 5 we've had for the past few days. I scanned through the flock several
times but frustratingly was unable to locate the elegant tern. I could see a
dog walker to the north, heading south along the shoreline and it was
inevitable that he would eventually flush the birds.
Looking further south I could see another large flock of Sandwich terns about
200m away so I decided the best thing to do was to walk towards them and scan
through that flock because when the first flock flushed it would undoubtedly
head my way, which is exactly what happened. A combination of the advancing
tide and dog walkers pushed many birds my way, some quite close. Still I
couldn't find the elegant tern, but it was just an awesome spectacle. By now
there must have been 4,000 Sandwich terns at least, and easily 2,000 common
terns, whilst behind them on the shoreline there was a flock of around 100
grey plover, most in summer plumage, with many sanderling running along the
beach and 50 bar-tailed godwits. Breathtaking!
Tim arrived and went off to read Sandwich tern rings whilst I stayed where I
was and kept scanning through my part of the flock. Eventually I saw Tim
beckoning me over, clearly he had found the elegant tern.
Cautiously I headed over, not wanting to flush the flock and he got me onto
the bird straight away. The light was perfect and this was about as close as
I'd been to any Sandwich terns at Formby this year, and it was a better view
of the elegant tern than I'd had at Cemlyn Bay. We watched it for about 20
minutes until finally the advancing tide which was now over our feet, forced
us to move back a little and a couple of minutes later the bird flew past us
and down the beach and landed about 100m south. I left it there, I was very
happy with what I had seen and had no desire to chase the bird around the
beach. Finally I'd got the views I wanted and at Formby. A truly breathtaking
spectacle.
All of my close ups of this bird are phone scoped with varying degrees of success. I really love this photo, it's by far the best I have achieved of the elegant tern. Even at Cemlyn Bay I couldn't get one this good.
However this is my overall favourite photo of the tern, taken on my camera.
Not only does is capture well the bird in flight, it also shows the scale of
the spectacle with so many Sandwich terns on the beach.
I love this photo of the terns. There are four species together here, arctic tern in the centre foreground, elegant tern, common tern and Sandwich terns. The photo really shows the difference in bill colours. I was surprised at how few arctic terns were reported during the elegant terns stay on the Sefton coast, I saw quite a few but usually it was single figure counts reported. There were certainly many more than that.
Just amazing numbers of terns on the beach.
There have been exceptional numbers of Sandwich terns at Formby this year and
they come from all over the British Isles. Obviously the elegant tern is with
birds from Cemlyn Bay, but others are from Hodbarrow in Cumbria, Forvie Sands
in Aberdeenshire and some with yellow rings are even thought to be from Lady's
Island, Republic of Ireland. Interestingly the latter is one of the largest
Roseate tern colonies in Ireland, so perhaps the ringed roseate I saw at
Formby last week is also from there. In August 2017 there was an albino /
leucistic Sandwich tern with the flock at Ainsdale which I actually saw at
Forvie Sands the following year (see below).
 |
| Photo: Albino / leucistic Sandwich tern, Forvie Sands 04/08/2018 which was also seen at Ainsdale in 2017. |
No comments:
Post a Comment