My day started at ARC and the usual hour or so spent looking out from Hanson hide. The two Avocet chicks now well grown and soon to fledge (hopefully) are still present with their ever attentive parents. A Bittern flew over and landed in the far reedbed and a supporting cast of 2 Garganeys, Common Sandpipers, Little-ringed Plovers, 4 Cattle Egrets and 4 Great White Egret meant that the hour went by quickly. On wandering to the Pines another visitor had located a juvenile Cuckoo and there were probably 7 Cattle Egrets on the reserve yesterday.
On checking the Common Tern colony on Burrowes, I was pleased to record 7 surviving chicks, although this colony is becoming a gull snack shack. Hopefully, some tern chicks will be able to fledge. Also on Burrowes, 7 Common Gulls, 10 Common Sands, 2 Dunlin, 2 Wood Sandpipers, one of them being very confiding, 3 Greenshank, Little-ringed Plovers and my first adult Yellow-legged Gull of the autumn. Also good comparison views of juvenile Herring and Lesser-black Gulls.
The Dipping Pond just beyond the Visitor Centre now has a surface layer of floating vegetation which has attracted Small Red-eyed Damselflies.
Around midday I went to Kerton Pit and enjoyed watching the roosting Sandwich Terns, Black-headed Gulls and Mediterranean Gulls along with 4 Whimbrel and c.200 roosting Curlew with 320+ Oystercatcher and a juvenile still being fed by its parents. At least 143 Sandwich Terns along with a handful of Common Terns. I managed to read one of the ringed juvenile Sandwich Terns which led me to contact an old acquaintance from Hampshire, Peter Potts.
