Christine's walking & birds blog

A solitary sanderling was also present - showing just a few concessions to the idea of summer plumage.

A dunlin came up onto the grass where I sat in my car and set about drilling the ground - at one point extracting what looked like a leatherjacket.

A herring gull was hunting on the falling tide, sailing a couple of metres from the shore and then plunging its head and neck in and coming up with fish or crabs which it had spotted gliding or scuttling across the sandy bottom.

And that, folks, is why the gulls don't need your fish-and-chips. They're perfectly capable of finding their own food - they just like to try it on.

Several ringed plovers, a couple of oystercatchers, and a common sandpiper were also present; while two whimbrels flew over calling and landed much further down the beach. Seven black guillemots were far out on the water, and a Bonxie cruised over.

Driving back across the headland I heard a cuckoo and spotted it up the slope, in a fairly lonesome pine.

Rotten pic, but it's only the second cuckoo I've managed to see this year. Back at the junction lay-by, I looked down across the sheep paddock to the river where a greenshank was feeding.

A last stop on the drive out was to look at the little pool where I first noticed bogbean flowers.

It's an odd little flower; there never seems to be a real "carpet" of blooms because the flowers don't come out together; there seem to always be seeding flowers and budding flowers as well as fully-out flowers on the stem at the same time - and the plants don't all bloom together either. So it remains a quiet wildflower, almost insignificant; if you don't know about it, you might not notice it - which was the case with me, until the chipper call of a snipe at the edge of the pool attracted my attention. Sad to relate, there was no chipper call to be heard today. Apart from a lone skylark, there was a silence on the moors.