After a good run of six visits adding nine new birds to my yearlist I finally drew a blank this afternoon, arriving at around 17:30 my first priority was to check the wooded areas for new migrants; a rather nagging south-westerly was blowing and, apart from the odd burst of song from one or other of the residents, passerine activity was confined to a single Sand Martin over the basin and a pair of Song Thrushes which came out to feed around half an hour before dusk. One or two pairs of this superlative songster breed on the patch but they are very rarely seen well, a usual encounter consisting of a subdued "sip" call as the bird vanishes into cover, so it was good to see them so well for a change. The tide was ebbing and I flushed two Common Sandpipers from the foreshore at Bow Creek; a pair of Shelduck were also on the creek with another pair apparently prospecting nest sites on the Pura Foods peninsula. Tufted Duck numbers were around 25% up on yesterday with 40 counted, all on the basin, other wildfowl included a Mute Swan, two Canada Geese, 36 Mallard and 13 Common Teal; finally around 80 mainly immature large gulls were loafing on the Millennium Dome mudflats.
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