I had gone over to the
Lincolnshire coast today with my wife to see my grandchildren who were on
holiday in a relations caravan. My
daughter, husband and my wife were going to a market and so I took the
opportunity to visit Gibraltar Point where there were apparently Turtle Doves
as I had yet to see any this year. I
parked in the beach car park and went to Finland Lagoon, which was almost dry
but there were there were five Little Egrets and a Kestrel on it. A visit to The Mere produced a Green
Sandpiper and five more Little Egret but there was no sign of the target
bird. Tennyson’s Sands held a few waders
that included twenty-two Avocets, nine Dunlin, a Snipe, seventy-eight
Black-tailed Godwits, a Green Sandpiper, two Greenshanks and twenty-one
Sandwich Terns.
I walked out to Mill Hill
where I was able to scan the sea and the scrub to the west. There were c.170 Sandwich Terns and a single
Common Tern amongst the mass of gulls roosting on the beach and I also counted
twenty-one Sanderling on the shore.
However there appeared to be little activity over the scrub area and I
started to walk back to the car park. I
met another birder who informed me that he was a regular and that he suspected
that there were just one pair of Turtle Doves and that he saw them about every
other visit. As I continued to walk back
to car park I picked up two doves flying towards me before they veered off and
continued to the roadside scrub, success they were Turtle Doves. I then saw one as it flew back to where from
the roadside scrub to the scrub nearer the beach.
This made my morning as I was
beginning to think that they might elude me this year as records in
Leicestershire & Rutland have been few and rather sporadic.
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