Arctic waders

I ventured out today in the continuing north west wind and cool condiitons with little expectation. I had a quick look at Snowhill this morning where once again there was very little, just 7 Avocet and a female Wheatear of note.

It was then over to East Side where I bumped into Andrew and we watched a nice second calender year Little Gull together. There were very few waders in the harbour so I went off to the spit to look for birds roosting there at high tide. Checklist HERE. There were 144 Ringed Plover, 197 Dunlin, 1 Turnstone and 2 Sanderling in the roost which marks another significant increase in the Arctic waders in the harbour.  

Other than that there were no Barwits or Knots, very few Whimbrel and nothing much else apart from the tern colony. 

There was ice on the car on Tuesday morning with the temperature going down to 4 C at night so the moth trapping has been uneventful. Milder air resumes next week so hopefully things pick up on various fronts. We are off to Bulgaria next weekend so one way or another things are going to get a bit more interesting.

2nd calender year Little Gull. I've seen plenty of Little Gulls locally but this is the first one actually at Pagham Harbour - now on 189 for the reserve. 

Dunlin and Ringed Plovers with presumed 'Tundra' Ringed Plovers (above) on their way to the Arctic and 'Taiga' Ringed Plover (below) nesting on the spit 

Sandwich and Common Tern 

Little Terns- lots of activity round the islands now where hopefully they will start nesting

Turnstone- really impressive bird in summer plumage 

2026 Ebird Data for Ringed Plover at Pagham Harbour showing the winter population leaving and then the second population in the Spring appearing in recent days. The zero data points unfortunately refer to no counts on those weeks and not zero birds. Was thinking of setting up a Pagham Harbour ebird account to transfer other observers data into a single hotspot to get some nice definition to the Ebird data.