Brownsea Island has been closed for the Winter since the end of the October half-term. This allows the Dorset Wildlife Trust and National Trust to do some of those annual maintenance jobs on the island, without risk to the public. As one of the regular Birders who is also a DWT volunteer on the island, I have been invited to pop over to help out with some high tide lagoon counts while the island was closed.
With the trip to Antarctica, I didn't have the time to get over in the back end of 2025, but I was keen to rectify this in the New Year. The first Wednesday of the year saw an icy lagoon with few Birds on it, but the following week looked good for a visit. It was a day when Poole Harbour would be between two days of solid rain, with crisp, still conditions. I met up with fellow Birding volunteer Phil Bentley for the National Trust staff boat and within ten minutes of departure, we were arriving at the Brownsea Quay. As we got off the boat, there was a shout that 'there was a Seal off the quay'. A quick naked-eye scan revealed a head popping up thirty metres from the quayside. Checking with the bins, it was the closest Grey Seal, I've seen in Purbeck. I mentally kicked myself for not bothering to take the proper camera, especially when it was still on view, when we left it, after ten minutes of watching it. A bonus flyby Kingfisher put in an appearance as it flew past the quay. My first Isle of Purbeck Year Tick for the day. It was time to head onto the check the lagoon.
It was a high tide between the neap tides (less than one point seven metres) and the spring tides (around two point three metres) and the high tide wasn't even two metres at the harbour mouth. On these tides, many of the Waders end up roosting close to their feeding areas, rather than being pushed onto the Brownsea lagoon. Still, there was a good selection of Waders on the high tide. A bonus was seeing my first Water Rail along with the expected Bar-tailed Godwits, for the Isle of Purbeck Year List. However, it wasn't the Water Rail or the Waders that were the highlight for the day: it was the lighting on the lagoon. There was a light frost and the sunny conditions were quickly burning off the frost and dampness from the previous day. It was time to grab some nice atmospheric photos of the lagoon.
After we completed the high tide lagoon count, we headed on for a cuppa in the DWT villa. After that the plan was to walk around the island and check from various viewpoints to see if we could relocate a Red-necked Grebe that had been briefly seen by the Birds of Poole Harbour bird boat on Sunday between Jerry's Point on Studland and Brownsea. Various locals including myself, had looked for it that afternoon and on the Monday, without joy. Phil and I were hoping that the still conditions would allow us to refind it. However, before I had finished my cuppa tea, I had a call from Graham Armstrong. He was watching the Red-necked Grebe from the Studland Houseboats. That narrowed down our search area considerably. Our tea mugs were quickly emptied and we headed off to Brownsea's South shore to view the South Deep channel. Phil and I only knew the direction Graham was looking at Studland, but we were looking from a completely different viewpoint, so we were almost starting from scratch. Fortunately, I picked the Red-necked Grebe up after a few minutes of scanning, fairly near to a Great Crested Grebe.
The Red-necked Grebe was my fourth Purbeck Year Tick for the day to take me to one hundred and sixteen and Green Woodpecker heard for the year. As always this follows the BOU taxonomy, but excludes any recent reintroductions and Feral Pigeons. It sounds a reasonable total, but I could add another ten species if I spent a day around the Purbeck coastline sites. However, all those species are Birds I will see without any trouble during Spring Birding. This year, I am focusing my efforts towards seeing the tricky species, rather than to get a big total quickly.
We spent a couple of hours looking offshore from various viewpoints around Brownsea, before we headed off to catch the 14:00 boat back to Poole. The other highlights were the two wintering Slavonian Grebes off Redhorn, twelve Black-necked Grebes off Goathorn and four Great Northern Divers. It had been a brilliant visit and hopefully I will be able to support other high tide counts before the island reopens.