Worth The Wait

I suppose I ought to start with the glorious five minutes [yes, five minutes; from 1517 and it was finally lost for the last time at 1522. It seemed like less...] at Berry Head yesterday...

Or rather the 8 1/2 hours I spent cowering next to the wall as the wind and waves did their best to remove me and then us. Phrasing is accurate as to my frank disbelief there was nobody there when I finally arrived. Yes, the wind was very strong and coming right in, yes, the waves were already sending white water over the blockhouse and making the approach... interesting, yes, the tide was coming in. But Berry Head is not a low edifice, and the seawatching spot is 2/3 of the way up, with the Wall giving maybe 25' on top of that.

Once I'd wedged my chair into something approaching a usable position on the steeply sloping grass it was pretty good. Being right by the wall, the wind carried most of the rain right over me, meaning only a couple of times did I need my brolly. Well, for the rain, anyway. It was actually very well sheltered there, and a huge contrast to the level main area and rocky sitting bit, which were subject to not only a wind that you'd need superhuman strength to hold a scope steady in, but incoming salt water that could likely knock you over backwards.

The sea was putting on one hell of a show, with a big swell driving at the rocks of Tor Bay and producing huge plumes of spray - the Ore Stone was topped by it more than once, and spray from the pink rock [between the seawatching spot and the blockhouse] obscured the land beyond routinely. The view out to sea also went away with annoying regularity - trying to get id on pesky small skuas at range was hard enough without the added interference! MD had arrived after about an hour and a half, and in the afternoon [Young Devon Birder] - briefly accompanied by Brave Parents - made it a trio. Only minutes before his arrival, we had been the beneficiaries of the sea's affections; a wave that must have gotten lost from The Perfect Storm put water high enough to not only get water over the wall, but drop it on top of us for several seconds. Imagine you're seawatching and then are suddenly under a seawater waterfall. No, we didn't have our brollies up...

Water was pouring down the wall for a couple of minutes as we poured it out from everywhere it could get into. While having to rinse off all your kit is annoying, I admit I found it exhilarating - that my silly hat saved me from getting water down my neck may be a contributing factor ;) But just think about how big that wave must have been; the seawatching spot is about 40m up, plus the wall at maybe another 7m, plus the extra height to be able to get all that water over the wall.. That's a big wave to send spray likely the full height of Berry Head.

Ok, enough about that.

So I'd battled my way in, messed about to get set and the first bird I saw was a Balearic. Right after that one went it's way - flying in a not very Balearic-like manner in the headwind - it was followed by two more.. I saw 80 shearwaters, and 74 of them were Balearic. Wowser! It must have been the Manxies' day off as only 4 went by. Four Manxies in more than 8 hours in September.. Ok. The other two were Sooty, btw :)
I had to wait more than an hour for my first skua, but eventually I got on 79 - Arctics and Bonxies with 2 Poms, the Long-tail and a very distant small skua which went out without ever showing more than its arse... Some of them came through very close - so close I'm sure we missed a lot. Likewise most of the Kittiwakes came by close and if there were any Little Gulls or Sabine's with them they got by under the radar.

There were very few terns passing and two Black Terns that tried spent a lot of time going backwards! Seawatching is forever unpredictable, and Random Bird Of The Day went to a female Pochard. Insane Bravery Award went to a lone Swallow, which headed out low overhead into the teeth of the gale.. On the clickers, Gannets scored 637, Kittiwakes 229, and Auks 110. The latter were at first mostly Guillemots, but later on more Razorbills made the overall mix about 50:50. Not clicked but tallied was a fair passage of Fulmars - 84 of them, including one very pale individual, easily the lightest Fulmar I've ever seen.

Early on a gathering of Gannets drew my attention to a patch of sea where despite the swell I got the briefest glimpse of a grey cetacean - most likely a Bottlenose - but a proper frenzy didn't develop.
Three Brixham trawlers came in - one being none other than the Vigilance. One yacht full of the questionably sane went out; 'Escapade' indeed...

And finally, the Leach's. Yes, made you wait until the end; at about three fifteen [Young Devon Birder] found a couple of Balearics which pitched down onto the sea to our north, quite close in to us, in the vicinity of several young gulls. While I was trying to get my scope on the Balearics I found a Storm-Petrel, fluttering as it fed among the waves. I called "Stormy!" even as a little voice in my head* was wondering why it's wings were that shape... MD had no such problems as he got on it very quickly; "It's a Leach's!"

And it really really was. It hung around for a while, once flying right past one of the [now four] Balearics loitering about what must have been something interesting, showing off its wonderfulness and generally being beautiful before neatly losing us all. I picked it back up further out and stayed on it for a bit longer as it headed out to sea, pretty much due east, before it finally lost me for good. What a bird.

WOW.

[I think that was justified, don't you? :D]


Now, about that week I've missed out- Oh dear, I'm out of time.





[[*As opposed to the Purple Pixies that tell you what to do, of course.]]