Bare Bones.

Wednesday seemed to end up having a bit of an allsorts feel about it and not much of it at that, but included the amazing growth of young birds, a dead one, an interesting Wheatear, and the Mutt Brigade.

Terns and Sandpipers.

Common Tern. Pete Woodruff.

The top image of the three Common Tern young with an adult behind them on Conder Pool was taken on 3 July, and the bird in the bottom image with Redshank on 14 July, I find the growth of these birds in 11 days quite amazing.

I saw all three young Common Tern for the first time on Wednesday along with an adult, also on Conder Pool, 10 Common Sandpiper were coincidentally on the same island as they were on Tuesday.

Gulls and Egrets.

The Lune Estuary at Glasson Dock saw two more Mediterranean Gull both 2nd summer birds, also high numbers seem to be the order of the day here recently with 13 Little Egret seen on Wednesday.

Gannet. Pete Woodruff.

Dead was the operative word for Cockersands, and this corpse of a Gannet was a sign of things to come on a couple of hours trawl here. But a juvenile Wheatear was something of a surprise, barely a juvenile out of downy feathers and on the coast already....does the Wheatear breed around here I ask myself.

I won't launch into a rant about where are all the farmland birds, but I find it hard to believe the only birds to qualify for the little black book in two hours spent on and around farmland were two Sylviidae, being a Whitethroat and Sedge Warbler....I worry about the sparsity of birds sometimes!

Butterflies seen, a Red Admiral and 2 Small Skipper.

The Mutt Brigade. 

A member of the Mutt Brigade was on the shore at Cockersands again on Wednesday as portrayed in the image above, ruining all possibility of finding anything between the Caravan Park and Plover Scar - quite a stretch - which is where this person and six charges walked. The day before I had found up to 100 Golden Plover in this very spot with just the slim chance of finding an American Golden Plover with them. But me finding a 'goodie' isn't really the issue here, there needs to be some attempt at stopping this kind of bird disturbance, the black mutt in the water above the handler put a group of feeding Eider to flight minutes before I took this picture.