A day’s birding in East Yorkshire - August 22, 2014

Dave, Roger and I decided to go to Flamborough in the hope of seeing some seabirds.  C.200 Golden Plover near Goole were the only birds of note we had on route and we arrived at Flamborough just before 09:30.  There was a brisk northwest wind on arrival and we could see plenty of Gannets from the car park and so we were quite optimistic.  On reaching the fog-horn station there were clearly plenty of Gannets and also a few Fulmar flying around.  There was a female Common Scoter on the sea and I picked up a couple of Arctic Skuas harassing a Kittiwake.  Shortly afterwards Roger picked up a single Manx Shearwater heading north and we found several Guillemots and a single Razorbill on the sea.  However it soon became very quiet with even the Gannet numbers dropping off.  Roger did pick up two Manx Shearwaters and another Arctic Skua heading south and Dave found a drake Common Scoter also heading south but that was about it.  A Little Egret was a surprise and then Roger noticed a bird on the cliff face that turned out to be a Purple Sandpiper and we had also seen a single Wheatear in fog-horn grounds.

We finally called it a day and went to South Landing seeing a Lesser Whitethroat just as we were leaving the car park.  There were quite a few people with some very noisy dogs on the beach at South Landing but we found an Eider just of shore and a party of waders in flight contained Dunlin and at least one Ringed Plover.  We walked along the shore towards Bridlington and found a concentration of Cormorants and gulls.  As we scanned through the flock we found three Oystercatchers, two Whimbrel, two Redshanks and six Turnstones amongst them as well as two Rock Pipits feeding on the shore line.  When we got back to road we scanned the other way and found four Ringed Plovers, two Sanderling and ten Dunlin and we assumed these were probably the waders seen in flight earlier.

As we drove home a tweet arrived indicating that there had been a Great Shearwater off Flamborough mid-afternoon and later two tweets of a juvenile and then an adult Sabine Gull, which was rather disappointing as it was so quiet earlier.