31 Dec 14 - When Vertical Is Best

I had a great morning today photographing Purple Sandpipers at the North side of Poole Harbour mouth. But I will leave those to a future post. Then I dropped into Brands Bay on the way home on the low tide. Yesterday, the bay was packed with Wildfowl & Waders and today it was just the same. But fortunately, the selfish bastards with shotguns I had to put up with yesterday, hadn't returned. It was difficult to know where to start as there were so many Birds. But after a quick scan of the near part of the bay, I started counting the Teal on the first proper scan. I got a bit over the 150 mark, when the next one I looked at was a male Green-winged Teal: a Studland Tick & the first one I've found. As you can imagine, I never completed the count. Next thing was to grab the phone, ring Paul Morton who is doing a Poole Harbour Year List & a couple of others to get them on their way, before getting some photos. After that is many more phone calls to locals & a couple of emails/tweets, before the battery died. Still the news was out, resulting in a minor twitch of seven Birders, including Paul. Most of the Harbour Listers have seen two or three so not a big turnout. The Green-winged Teal performed well & was still on view from 12:30 till 15:30 when Graham Armstrong & myself left (we were the last to leave).

Green-winged Teal: Male with the vertical stripe with a Male Teal (with the horizontal stripe) 

Green-winged Teal: Male. The vertical stripe is still very obvious head on

The bird was several hundred metres from the hide, but I'm not that impressed with the quality of the photos. I've now found out that the camera wasn't on the largest file size for jpg photos. So hopefully it will still be there tomorrow, now I've switched to the largest file size.

This is the fifth record for Studland, with the previous records being all males:-
Littlesea (22 Jan - 29 Jan 1983)
Brands Bay (2 Feb 1985)
Brands Bay (20 Nov 1985)
Brands Bay (10 Mar 2002)
Hopefully, it will stay around for the New Year.

Happy New Year to all the Readers of the Blog