15 folk attended a Club field trip today. We walked from the car park upriver as far as Portobello and back again and then spent a short while in a howling gale on the seafront looking for purple Sandpipers at high tide. Near Portobello there were 7 Goldeneye [2 males and 5 females] 2 Little Grebes, a lone drake Teal and a lone Shelduck. There were only 2 Redshank and a few folk saw a Common Sandpiper.
There were around 30 Black-headed Gulls feeding in the surf at the river mouth, and an adult Common Gull joined them from time to time. Along by the rocky foreshore a few lucky folk managed to find a couple of Purple Sandpipers but I only managed around 4 or 5 Turnstone. A small flock of waders did fly by and didn’t look right for Turnstone so they could have been Purple Sands but they had to remain as the ones that got away,. The wind at this stage was really fierce so we gave up.
Not a big list – just 27 species. Click here to see it.