Today we headed further north and I type from abeam Lindisfarne
from a small farm campsite with glorious views, and it’s sunny too!
We travelled here via the RSPB reserve at Saltholme near
Middlesbrough. As you’ll see from some
of the photos a scenic location it is not!
However, the reserve area offers a tranquil respite amidst the
industrial landscape, and we added to our bird count J. This is thanks in part to one of the staff
being able to point out a few species and showing us through a fairly
high-powered viewing scope!
We weren’t able to picture all we saw, partly because the
camera battery died, and partly because we had insufficient zoom.
Today’s spots that were new to us included a great
black-backed gull, a cuckoo (never thought I’d actually see one), a reed
bunting, teal, gadwall, moorhen and wheatear. We
also saw sandmartins again and to our surprise avocet too (I didn’t know they were
so far north), also great crested grebe and some close quarter views of common
tern hovering and diving for fish. We're becoming quite duck blase now and spotted tufted duck, shelduck, shoveler and pochard again.
This
site also boasts some waders but we weren’t lucky on this occasion. It was raining fairly heavily for the second
half of our viewing which probably didn’t help.
Tomorrow we’ll cycle over to Holy Island. We’ve checked the tide-times and can cross
around lunchtime and will have the afternoon to explore.
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| Gadwall |
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| Sandmartin |
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| Cuckoo (male) |
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| Grey Heron |
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| Teal |
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| Great Black-backed Gull |
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| The industrial backdrop! |
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| From the Centre's cafe |
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| Tranquil setting ready for Holy Island and Lindisfarne |
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| A moorhen who'd just been chased by a coot, hence the blur! |
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