Sunday 24th November 2024
We haven’t had much luck with the weather
on our visits to this site in recent years.
In March 2022 we faced the aftermath of Storm Eunice, the next visit, in
December 2022, was severely affected by rain and fog and rain stopped play in
December 2023. Alas, we ran into Storm
Bert today and continued the sequence.
Thankfully it was day two of the storm and yesterday’s rain had moved
north leaving us with just the strong winds to contend with
The main highlights are recorded below:-
- Without doubt, our bird of the day was the peregrine which we saw having an altercation with a black-headed gull at the far side
of the reserve, directly opposite our viewing point at Purfleet hide. The peregrine wasn’t having it all its
own way and the gull was giving as good as it got and, as far as we could
see, it all ended well – an honourable draw! Despite the distance, Patrick managed to
get these two images of the bird in flight – no mean feat!
Courtesy
of Patrick Sullivan
Courtesy of Patrick Sullivan
This is normally
a good site for waders but we struggled to find many today – probably due to
the high water levels.
- The most interesting one was
snipe. Two were spotted in the
vegetation beside Purfleet scrape.
After a while, another two joined them and by the time we left the
hide there were six on show. More
were seen on the Butts scrape.
Courtesy
of Ian Hodgson
Despite the difficult
conditions we managed to find at least 48 bird species today – a very
creditable total.
2024 species count=205
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