Dawn on the channel coast

 It was Rita my mother-in-laws birthday at the weekend. She lives in Weymouth so I took the opportunity of a morning to go birding. Eschewing a lie-in and a full English breakfast I headed out just before dawn to one of my favourite spots for birding - Portland Bill. The is a superb if sometimes bleak spot, jutting out into the English  channel. It can be a magnet for migrants and I have seen some nice birds there, probably the best being the great-spotted cuckoo in 2016.Generally though it is the seabirds which are the stars and I had a number I wanted to get onto my year-list. I pulled into the carpark as a beautiful dawn was breaking with the sun just touching the horizon.

Out to sea there were hundreds of auks flying past, mainly guillemots but a spattering of razorbills mixed in with them. A pair of ravens were flying around the lighthouse and rock pipits were pottering around on the rocks below the obelisk.

One of my targets were the purple sandpipers. Up to 9 have been present over the Winter but the two I saw were brief views of birds which did not want to settle.

Other year-ticks included gannets, kittiwakes and shags but all a long way offshore. I did also life-tick one of our aircraft carriers transiting along the channel.

I then moved back inland to Ferrybridge to look at the flock of Mediterranean gulls. Without doing an accurate count I would estimate over 100 on the mudflats. This is an amazing number of these recently arrived, now breeding residents. The flock can get even larger though, into the many hundreds.

In breeding plumage they have truly black-hoods unlike black-headed gulls which actually have brown hoods. Give it a couple of months and that will happen but now they have white heads with a touch of black smoking behind the eyes on them. They also have large bold-red bills and all-white wings. With practice they stand out as being very different from black-headed gulls. I also found some black-necked grebes in the harbour but they were miles away.

All in all a really good morning. I missed the full English at the hotel but the glorious sunrise and 10 year ticks more than made up for it!