Black-winged stilts, Pennington Flash

Wow! What a morning! I had a late night last night due to visiting a local nightjar and long-eared owl site so I decided that especially given the time of year, I might as well have a lie in bed this morning, because as I said yesterday, there's not much happening at this time of year....

I woke up at 7am, made a cup of tea, pottered around for a bit, had some breakfast and then thought, "you know what, I may as well go for a quick look at the flash, because you never know, today might be the day".... and it was! 

I couldn't stay long, it was just a quick look, and after half an hour I'd packed up and was heading back to the car with just a redshank and a single common tern to show for my efforts. I was almost at the car when suddenly I saw two gangly black and white birds flying towards me very low over the water, less than a metre above the water I'd say. I'm sure that they were going to land on the car park foreshore but then at the last minute they saw me and turned and flew along the shoreline towards the spit, at this point less than 10m from me. Boom, two black-winged stilts, no mistaking them!

I legged it back to Horrock's and sure enough they had landed about half way down the spit. I just had time to fire off the photos in this post before they flew again, away from me along the spit and then turned as if going into Ramsdales and out of view for me. Despite searching for the next 45 minutes I was unable to relocate them anywhere, but then I got a call from Ian who had seen them from Horrock's near the gull island. Unfortunately by the time I got back to Horrock's they had flown again and this time disappeared for good.

There's virtually no habitat for black-winged stilts at the flash, but I have been half expecting them because there has been an influx this spring with a few birds moving around the north west. They were always going to be more or less in and out jobs though, there's nothing to keep them at Pennington Flash. 

So yeah, as I said yesterday, not much happening at this time of year. 

I consider the left hand bird with the jet black wings and dark head markings to be a male, whilst the right hand bird with almost white head and dark brown wings is the female. They both have a white trailing edge to the wings which seems to indicate that they are 1st summer birds.