July 6th Cley

Mum was itching to go out bird watching with me. As her job is taking a lot of her time, we haven't gone out much together like we used to. Today, we finally had that chance. It appeared to be a nice sunny day for a trip out to Cley. However, as soon as we started the ride over there, the rain clouds suddenly rolled in and it rained for most of our visit. Where did that come from?

 There has been a couple of interesting birds at Cley in this last week. A squacco heron made a brief visit earlier in the week, but it has now long disappeared. There has also been a green-winged teal hanging around and it was possible that it was here today. The catch, though, is that this American version of our European teal is currently moulting. As it is now in its eclipse phase plumage, the distinctive white stripe that goes vertically down its body instead of being horizontally across the back like the more your usual, everyday, British teal has, that stripe is no more than a white spot or smudge right now. That meant that it was near impossible to identify it positively All the teal looked all the same at this moment in time. I left it to the professionals to find, who were also struggling in doing so and never found it while I was there.

Spoonbill

So it was raining and I failed to locate the rare bird I was looking for. Was this visit just a pointless waste of time? No. There were still plenty of things to see. It was actually one of the best visits to Cley in quite some time. The stars of the show were the spoonbills. There were five of them, two of which were youngsters with smaller bills and were constantly pestering the adults for food or attention. A couple of them were much closer to the hides than they have been in a while, providing amazing views as it continued to sieve through the water with its sensitive spoon-shaped bill for its next meal. I also saw a sandwich tern, a little gull, a few male ruff in summer plumage adorned with their varied coloured ruffs, plenty of avocets with a few chicks wandering around, godwits, dunlin, mallard and shelduck ducklings, lapwing, oystercatchers, greylags and lots of sand and house martins.

Young Spoonbill pestering an adult