A day at Flamborough Head, East Yorkshire - September 4, 2013

With the weather forecast of a fresh north west blow at Flamborough, David, Roger and I felt it would probably be good sea watching from the head and set off early morning.  When we left the wind was fairly light and westerly but it gradually increased as we moved north and appeared spot on when we arrived.

As we walked down to the head we could see lots of Gannets and were fairly optimistic but a returning birder indicated it was fairly quiet.  Just after getting settled David saw a couple of Sooty Shearwaters and I managed to get on one but Roger failed to connect.  Gannets must have been passing at about a 1000 per hour and we must have observed close to 3000 during our three hour stay but the only other species going through in reasonable numbers were Fulmar, also moving north.  In fact most birds were heading north and we also had seven Brent Geese, two Common Scoters on a couple of occasions, two Velvet Scoters, three Red-throated Divers, eight Manx Shearwater and nine Kittiwake.  The only skuas we saw were five and then a single Arctic Skua and two Great Skuas, which bucked the trend and were heading south.  Probably the best bird was Balearic Shearwater, which was heading north.  It was called by another birder and whilst scanning I picked up in the scope, thinking initially it was a Sooty as overall it appeared quite dark, but I then noticed it was showing some white mottling on the belly and was clearly shorter winged than a Sooty.  I must have watched it for several minutes as it battled to head north and just before it flew out of few it was joined by a Manx.  David and Roger both failed to pick it up despite my continued efforts to get them on it and I even tried to get Roger to look through my scope but he struggled to get in position and the opportunity had gone.

With our parking running out we called it a day and went to South Landing where we had lunch before walking down the hill to view the bay.  We heard Tree Sparrows calling as we were having lunch and four flew over just before we set off for home.  From the beach we saw three Common Scoter, several Shag, fourteen Oystercatchers, nine Ringed Plovers, three Dunlin, two Curlew, two Redshanks and five Sandwich Terns.

On our journey north we had seen a party of Golden Plover just as we were coming off the M62 but the only other birds of note during or journeys were four Buzzards.