The day after

One of my best days birding was three years ago when I got the weather right and headed to Cley. A combination of wind and rain drove large movements of birds onto the coast. Over three hours we had hundreds of assorted little auks, skuas and shearwaters. Foul weather but good birding. Over this weekend there had been something similar, a large movement of birds all along the East coast including hundreds of pomarine skuas and little auks. The weather still looked reasonable on Monday so I thought it was worth a try to see if I could catch the tail end of the passage. 

By the time I got to Cley about 9.30 the wind had dropped although it was still onshore, pushing anything out there a bit closer to the beach. About 15 people were already by the shelter on the beach but I quickly ascertained it was pretty quiet. A large flock of scoters were on the sea and when they flew you could occasionally pick out a velvet scoter amongst them - told by the white sing-bars seen in flight. I spent about 4 hours in all scanning the sea in good viewing conditions but only two things got the pulse racing.

First, the people to the left of where we were standing called out "white-billed diver". We all got onto a passing large diver, quite far out. We had already seen a number of smaller red-throated divers and a couple of larger great northern divers. This one did look very white in flight and was clearly a large diver. Was it a white-billed? Personally I'm not sure as I didn't get a good enough view and don't have as much experience of telling apart divers in flight. I'd already seen them earlier in the year at Portree anyway so I'll put that one down as a possible. 

Second was actually one of my target birds for the trip. One of our group of about 10 called out "little auk". I started to scan the sea expecting to see a small blob piling past us at speed. "no, settled on the sea, just beyond the breakers". 

Indeed it was, a small bird bobbing around in the surf only 20 yards off the beach. Little auks are relatives of our guillemots and razorbills and are normally found in the Arctic. In Autumn though storms can drive them south and then they gradually relocate north along the East coast. They are tiny   birds, about starling sized and normally you see them whizzing along over the waves. This was the best view I've had so far.

They are one of those birds with a cute expression, which again you don't normally see. It stayed for 10 minutes or so and then lifted off and carried on with its journey. We saw two others as well, one settled further out and another in flight.

Elsewhere it was pretty quiet with the exception of a group of 7 snow buntings on the beach.

They were very flighty and you couldn't get close to them. It was still half-term and there were numerous families walking the beach with their dogs. A metal-detectorist scanning the tide line kept flushing them as well. The slow autumn is at least ticking over!