The end of the October was spent in Yorkshire with a few trips out to the coast. Strong North Easterlies held the promise of a good seawatch and an early start, driving over the Wolds through horizontal rain and sleet, saw me and Jono at Flamborough at dawn. We hunkered down behind the fog station wall and over the next hour the good and the brave of the cape assembled in the gale. There was a sizeable and varied movement of duck battling out of the bay and mostly northwards and included a drake Long-tailed Duck, Mergansers, Pintail, Goldeneye and Velvet Scoter of note. Both Manx and Sooty Shearwater cruised the swell and after quite some time some of the expected Skuas appeared - a flock of Bonxies rose upwards above the horizons and pushed southwards and a few Pomarines moved through but not in the numbers we were hoping for. Within the shelter of the cape further down the coast 500 were to be recorded and not for the first time this autumn the words |"We should have gone to Hornsea" were to be uttered. The Cape was delivering though and a couple of Little Auk whizzed by, tiny pied bullets fired into the storm. A brief interlude to get a ticket on the car and on our return we had missed a Black Guillemot. It had pitched onto the sea and been lost but it didn't take Jono long to relocate it feeding alongside a Razorbill and when it took flight and moved North everyone got a good view. I had to be back in Ely for teatime so headed south myself at 10, a good but cold and wet seawatch in the bag.
http://birdingdad.blogspot.com/2018/10/cape-yorkshire-tystie.html
The previous day I'd returned, via the feeding station at Forge Valley, to Scarborough to have another go at photographing the confiding Med Gulls. We found 3 at Holbeck and they were very showy in the autumnal sun.
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