Sunday December 15th

Mostly sunny, although a large black cloud produced a few spots of rain. A very light westerly. After feeling so uninspired by the weather and the lack of change on the patch recently that I didn't bother to go in the week, Dave and I needed a decent bird to pick us up. And we got one.

Initially it all seemed similar; three or four Stonechats in the hedge bordering the pool, Dave had counted about 200 (I forget how many he said) Redwings before my late arrival, and the Flash field gave us three Grey Herons, a Little Egret, and a few Mallard. It also contained a lot of gulls. We decided on 87 Black-headed Gulls and seven Lesser Black-backs, a lot more than usual.

This very wet autumn has left all the parts which could flood well flooded, and this often attracts gulls. However after I shouted Little Owl a bit too loudly (one flew past us) all the gulls took off and that seemed to be that.

A little later I was half way up the slope to the raptor watch point by Stapenhill Wood when I stopped to scan a few large gulls which were drifting past, and I immediately got onto a rather dark grey mantled Herring Gull type. Alarm bells rang immediately and I alerted Dave to see the bird. I was thinking Yellow-legged Gull, although the chances of claiming one on flight views seemed optimistic. Dave got onto it (it helped that the only other gulls we could see were Lesser Black-backs) and after initially only flying away it started to drift back, and get lower. Could it be going to land? We lost it behind the trees and hot-footed it to a place we knew we could get views of the large field we thought it might be in.

Fortunately I still carry a scope and tripod, and sure enough about 30 Lesser Black-backed Gulls had settled, and there was a paler one with them. But it seemed to be a Herring Gull. I passed the scope to Dave and he agreed. Confusion. I looked again and suddenly the gulls shifted revealing the front half of a second pale gull with a white head. This was the bird. A Lesser Black-backed then stood in front of the Herring Gull, and the putative Yellow-legged Gull remained sitting down and partly obscured.

The gull flock

Second right from the crow

We decided we needed to try to get closer and started down the slope. Fifty metres on I stopped to scan, and noticed that all the gulls had stood up. We ramped up the magnification on the scope and started to believe. Suddenly the gulls started to take off, in the distance some dog-walkers had entered the field. The bird took flight (oh no), but while the Lesser Black-backed Gulls flew off, our bird circled round and landed again. Through the scope we could see its legs were yellowish. Also it had an encouragingly attenuated rear end.

Yellow-legged Gull

Yellow-legged Gull

We were happy with it. Yellow-legged Gull, the first ever seen at Morton Bagot. My bridge camera isn't really powerful enough to replicate what we could see through the scope. I've tried hitting the "enhance" button to improve the shot on the last photo, but the above photos were the best I could manage.

Pretty soon it flew off and we thought it could be going to the flash field so we headed back there. Sadly there was no sign of it, and we decided to make tracks.