Cruising for Gulls

It must be a sign of desperation  when you start to indulge in habitat creation to try and boost your year list.

Well I call it habitat creation, others call it ploughing, either way it worked. A few days of drying and it seemed to be about time to try and drag in some gulls.

                  Habitat creation

You would think that gulls would appear and dive in as soon as you start ploughing with all those worms.

Instead they circle and dive and leave and come back and so on for up to an hour, if there's a collective name for a flock of foraging gulls it's probably 'a suspicion' , finally deciding  it's safe they start to settle. Once they're engaged they pull in other small flocks from all around and gradually the numbers build until you get what you want in the form of 3 Med Gulls. Two adults and a 2nd winter. Meds don't seem to get as involved as Black Headeds in the whole following a plough thing, they hang back slightly feeding on older ploughed ground as though a species as superior as them shouldn't be seen to be indulging in the melee behind the tractor.

       Shortly after 5 Lesser Black Backeds joined in to add my second Gull tick of the day. And a Jay flying along a hedgerow was the third.

      That was it for the year ticks though one there was one other interesting sighting. While crossing a field

I noticed a pale Chiffchaff feeding in a wet corner of a field. Pale and buff and grey suggested Siberian Chiff.

It was obviously different from the two wintering Chiffchaffs which joined it and all features pointed to Tristis,

but it took three hours of following it over two days before it finally called and confirmed it's eastern origin.

Still present at the time of writing now I just need them split before the end of the year for it to really matter.

          "Split me, split me"

50 sp and 54 points