Blackrock Birding

After a visit to a French market, where I bought a couple of very fresh baguettes and discovered that, yes, I had heard right and been warned in French that I was going to be burned.

I took the red-hot bread home for lunch and my birding friend and I realised that we couldn't sit at home on such a sunny day.

He looked up recent sightings and we decided to head for the area which in my youth was known as Black Rock and was mainly for rock-pooling expeditions. It is now home to a large Marina, although my visits are usually for shopping or cinema trips when I rarely see a single one of the boats moored the other side of all the shops and restaurants etc.

The small beach inside the west arm of the outer harbour proved to have a number of Ringed Plover and Turnstones on it and in the further distance along the sea defences were Great Black-backed Gulls and Cormorants.

With binoculars it was just possible to see it

No sign of the bird we had come to see so we made our way along the arm as far as we could and became aware of someone shouting at us. A man we later discovered to have a bicycle and be riding backwards and forwards along the harbour arms had spotted us as binocular-carrying birders and was frantically trying to attract our attention to a small dot on the water below and behind him. Our quarry was in the water along the outside of the harbour arm.

The other arm.


So we set off on the long march back along the East arm, through one detour because of work in progress, back through the commercial then the residential areas of the Marina, round another detour because of more work and finally all along the East arm where, inevitably, our cycling friend informed us that the bird had flown over to the West arm, where we had been before...



Not an unpleasant walk in the sun though, having seen fisherman actually landing fish and Common and Sandwich Terns undertaking similar activities further out. We also met a Kittiwake sitting on the wall.

Another long walk later, we arrived among a small group of birders at the place we started from and were informed that the bird had gone back the other way again...

Shortly afterwards though, my friend spotted him flying across the end of the arm and down to the water on the Eastern seaward side of the arm. At first he was quite difficult to spot as he appeared and disappeared behind the caissons on the waves. He was quite recognisable in the binoculars though if one leaned out over the sea. Happily, it soon became obvious that he was slowly moving in our direction, until he was more or less directly below us for a while, before slowly heading back seawards again.

I had my Grey Phalarope tick.