A very grey day

With another day free to go birding I looked at the inter web and hatched a plan last night. The options were either to go to Norfolk on spec as anything could drop in or to revisit the south coast for a possible pair of year-ticks. The weather wasn't great for either option but at least looked workable for the south coast.
My two targets were a wryneck at Titchfield Haven and a grey phalarope at Cuckmere Haven. I quite liked the coincidence of place names there! I decided on the wryneck first and got there by 7.45 to a very grey dawn. No rain but it was cold and one of those days when dawn never really comes. Titchfield is a good reserve and I've seen some cracking birds there, most notably the greater yellowlegs a few year ago now. The wryneck though was apparently lurking around some chalets nearby. Another birder confirmed this and that it had been seen late evening. Good auguries to start off with. Things rapidly turned south though over the next hour and half as a stream of birders arrived but of the wryneck there was not a sign. A few chiffchaffs in the bushes, oystercatchers on the beach and brent geese on the sea were scance consolation for an early morning dip. I refreshed myself with a coffee and gave it up to try for my second target further along the coast. It took me almost 90 minutes to get there with traffic and roadworks not being with me. Cuckmere Haven is between Brighton and Eastbourne. I got a glossy ibis here at there start of the year. It is basically an estuary and valley that floods in Winter. By the time I got there two things were immediately apparent. First, I had caught up with the bad weather. It was absolutely chucking it down!! Second, this was not an isolated incident as the river had burst its banks and flooded the valley and half of the car park. The phalarope had been seen "well" about an hour before so I put on my full wet weather gear, wrapped the camera in a bag and headed off.
The directions seemed OK: being seen from a concrete path towards a farm. A local man fortunately confirmed that the path by the car park did in deed lead to said farm. A couple of hundred yards along it and all I had to show for my dampness were some miserable-looking gulls on the flood. I met a birder coming back from further down the path who had not seen the bird either. Despondency was starting to set in as the rain came down even harder. I had another coffee to fortify me and carried on searching. I had been catching up on alerts on my phone and suddenly "grey phalarope showing well at Cuckmere Haven" came up for 5 minutes previously. Very confusing! There were no birders between me and the car park so there had to be only one option, that I hadn't gone far enough. Wiping off my glasses so I could see the path I carried on along the flooded fields. Eventually I reached a sign where the path split, right to the beach, left to the farm. Hmmmm, perhaps when the instructions said path to farm they didn't mean the one from the car park but from here? No birders in sight but I turned down it. There was a small stream behind a fence and lo and behold in the middle of it, bold as brass was a small, grey, ever-busy bird.

Phalaropes are actually wading birds but behave more like ducks. They feed on the surface, picking off insects and this one was clearly hungry.

The one thing that didn't put it off was the weather, as you can see in this video.

I stayed for about 20 minutes and it just kept pottering up and down the channel hoovering up the insects.

It took me about twenty minutes to get back to the car where I had a vague plan of drying out a bit then going back with my bigger lens to get even better shots. By the time I'd had yet another coffee and a sandwich the weather was even worse and the sky was totally battleship grey. I gave it up and headed home. A bit of a curates egg of a day. One out of two birds seen and that almost gave me pneumonia. It was a great bird though and showed really well so overall I suppose a satisfactory day. Still need 10 ticks to get to my best ever year which might be hard. A couple of lifers of course would help: Raddes warbler at Wells wood anyone??