No shearwaters! Why bother seawatching?

It’s that time of year when many a birder heads off to their local headland or further afield to Cornwall or Ireland to take advantage of some superb seawatching, particularly shearwater passage. It even slightly amuses me when I read on twitter or on various blogs about a poor day seawatching at Pendeen as they only saw one Great Shearwater and a handful of Cory’s! Now, I used to live near Pendeen and know where they are coming from but perhaps a little bit of perspective is needed. I spent 8 ½ hours on Sunday seawatching in Hemsby and had an excellent day yet there wasn’t a shearwater of any shape or size in sight!

So why do I bother with it? In the last 2 years I have clocked up over 250 hours of proper seawatching, not including the occasional glances out I may have from my house, and recorded over 58,000 birds onto BirdTrack. In that time I have recorded 15 shearwaters and two petrels. Sooty Shearwaters are the most common shearwater I have had off Hemsby with a mighty total of 8 birds, although Manx Shearwater aren’t too far behind on 7. That equates to 0.03 birds per hour! Leach’s Petrel is the only petrel that I’ve seen off Hemsby and only one, the other petrel was too distant to ID although I had it as a probable Leachs. So 2 years, or 250 hours of seawatching is worse than ½ hour on a crap day at Pendeen.

Perhaps it’s the skuas, gulls and terns that keep me sane during the seawatches. Well, a quick glance does show that I have seen four species of skua, Arctic by far the most common with 156 followed by 33 Bonxies. My BirdTrack data shows that I have seen 11 Pomarine Skuas although I think that this is skewed slightly by one or two individuals hanging around the area for a few days and I would think that the actual figure is nearer 7 birds. Finally, and probably the rarest seabird I have seen so far are the two Long-tailed Skuas, an adult and a juvenile in 2013. Again, these are very low numbers, 0.03 and 0.007 birds per hour respectively for Poms and Long-tails.  I’m guessing, as I don’t have exact numbers, that the figures for skuas and shearwaters are a lot lower than other areas further north in Norfolk and I wonder if this is to do with the close proximity of the Scroby Sands Offshore Wind Farm and sand bank pushing birds further out to sea by the time they arrive at Hemsby?

Gulls are an ever present sight on a seawatch and I have had the fortune to add a few scarce species such as Glaucous Gull (2) and Yellow-legged Gull as well as some good movements of Little Gulls at times including 257 passing south on 19^th January this year. However, in general it has been poor for gulls and I have yet to find the much anticipated Sabine’s Gull off Hemsby yet.

Thousands of terns pass by Hemsby throughtout the summer, whether it be foraging Little Terns in June and early July or large numbers of Common Terns and smaller numbers of Sandwich Terns moving south in late July and August. Over the 2 years I have recorded over 11,000 ‘comic’ terns moving south, the majority identified as Common Terns and only 23 Arctic Terns. Taking into account the number that I recorded as ‘comic’ terns the number of Arctic Terns still amounts to only 0.3% of the total of identified Common/Arctics! Seven Black Terns and a solitary Roseate Tern add a bit of uncommon/scarce feel to the tern records. So, all in all skuas, gulls and terns have mustered less than 20 ‘interesting’ records between them.

Auks are surprisingly thin on the ground here, a total of 534 recorded since August 2012 and the vast majority Guillemots with only 31 Razorbills, 3 Little Auks and 3 Puffins to show for my efforts. Divers and grebes show a similar trend although slightly more are recorded with over 8500 birds recorded of which 98.8% are Red-throated Divers. This winter there was a few days of amazing passage with 1481 past north in 1 ½ hours on 17^th March and 1249 past north in an hour on 18^th March. Great Crested Grebes are a regular sight in small numbers in winter with a few passing Hemsby most weeks. Great Northen Divers are pretty thin on the ground with only 7 recorded but nowhere near as hard to see as Black-throated Diver, my solitary record falling on the 1^st January this year. I have managed to see two other species of grebe, Slavonian (2) and Red-necked (1) but again neither are an annual occurrence.

There are a few other seabirds that I haven’t mentioned that are commonly seen such as Gannet (the most common bird recorded with 9312), Fulmar (surprisingly low numbers, 90 birds) and Cormorants (8167 birds). Shags are not the easiest bird to see off east Norfolk I believe so I am relatively happy with picking out 16 so far.

After all this pointless waffling I have finally made it onto the main reason why I seawatch so much on patch. Of course I wish I could see more shearwaters etc but to protect what is left of my sanity I try to look at it practically. Setting the scene, my patch has no freshwater and no wader habitat so I have to rely almost entirely on my seawatching to see waders and wildfowl. I have recorded 22 species of wader and 20 species of wildfowl while seawatching and that equates to just under a quarter of my overall patch list! Although I haven’t seen any rare species of wader or wildfowl I have to admit a certain amount of joy at watching my first Grey Phalarope fly past, my one and only Avocet to date move south or the flock of 5 Scaup heading north. Obviously seaduck are relatively common, with Common Scoter, Eider and Shelduck a regular sight while small numbers of Red-breasted Merganser, Goldeneye and Velevet Scoter are normally recorded in winter. Long-tailed Duck and Goosander still have to make it onto my patch list, hopefully this winter. 

Dabbling ducks move past in varying numbers from the abundant Wigeon and Teal, to the regular but in small numbers, Mallard, Pintail and Shoveler to the genuine patch gold in the shape of Tufted Duck (5 birds) and Gadwall (2). I am quite possibly the only PWC contestant to air grab a Gadwall!

Other than Brent Geese, geese are thin on the ground although two patch ticks in the shape of a lone Egyptian Goose and two small flocks of Barnacle Geese add a slightly plastic feel to my seawatching....

The graph below shows the breakdown of waders recorded on a seawatch, no real surprises although the Black-tailed Godwit numbers are slightly skewed by one flock of 130 fying directly west straight over my head. Other than this record they are actually a very hard bird to get on patch.

I have now recorded 91 species on patch through seawatching and yes, I haven’t seen a large shearwater, many petrels, an albatross, a Feas type etc but on a patch level it’s been pretty good fun.  I can only dream of a day like the ones of Pendeen or Porthgwarra, heck I can only dream of some of the days that are had 25 miles away off Sheringham as well!!

Where are all the Cormorants?

As many of you may know, if you follow me on twitter, I like to seawatch, partly because I can from my sofa and partly because I lived in Cornwall for 4 years which saw me cave in to the dark arts of seawatching! However, seawatching at Hemsby is a far cry from Pendeen or Porthgwarra! No longer am I counting shearwaters in their hundreds or thousands, seeing flocks of petrels etc. In fact I’ve only recorded 11 shearwaters and 2 petrels in the last 20 months off Hemsby. Autumn can still be good here with nice skua passages and wildfowl and waders passing through but for most of the year it is the common, the mundane birds that keep me going with the hope of a nice patch year tick along the way with 2014 delighting me with Red-necked Grebe, Black-throated Diver and some unseasonal skuas.

So to the common birds, it was in the early part of 2013 that I started taking a real interest in Cormorants. In January and February I was recording some really high numbers of Cormorants moving south with maximum counts of 913, 893 and 696, culminating in a total of 3398 being recorded up to 18^th March 2013. In the same period this year I have only recorded 374! Why?

Was my effort higher in 2013? No, in 2013 I had seawatched a total of 25 hours 45 minutes up to this date, in 2014 it was up to 40 hours 30 minutes. I then started to think of the other more common species that I record while seawatching, it seemed like it has been a bad year for Brent Geese and Common Scoter (wildfowl in general really) but did the figures match up to what I was thinking?

Looking at the raw numbers does indeed show that it has been a poor year for Brent Geese, Wigeon and indeed wildfowl in general, passing Hemsby. But it also appears at first glance that it hasn’t been a bad year but in fact a better year for Common Scoter than 2013, unlike what I had thought. The table also shows it has been a great year for Gannets and Red-throated Divers (more on the divers later). This, however, does not paint a true picture. As I said before I have been seawatching more in 2014, 14 hours 15 minutes more (57% more) than in 2013 so to get a more accurate picture I decided to look the number of birds per hour.

This table still shows that Brent Goose and Wigeon numbers are far lower than last year as I had thought and that there was in fact very little difference between 2013 and 2014 for Common Scoter and Gannet numbers. Is it due to the mild winter we have had down here? It does highlight the dramatic difference in the two years for Cormorants. It would interesting to know if other areas of the Norfolk coast have suffered similar drops in numbers or the reverse and the cormorants I was recording last year are somewhere further along the coast somewhere?

And so I go onto the Red-throated Divers. Both the above tables suggest that it has been a great year for RTDs so far with over 3000 more recorded and over 64 per hour more than 2013. If I had written this post over the weekend (as I had intended to do) it would have been a different story. On the 17^th and 18^th March 2014 I had a crazy passage of RTDs, in total over those two mornings (2 ½ hours of seawatching) I recorded 2730 divers mainly going north. So, if I had written this at the weekend the RTD figures would have looked like this:

I could have been writing about all but Gannets being recorded in lower numbers and about how poor seawatching has been this winter but instead I can now rave about the huge numbers of RTDs compared to last year etc but perhaps it just illustrates that you need to catch the right days to seawatch, not go offshore working when the peak days happen etc and that nothing has changed from the two years

Fortunately I’ve put all this seawatch data into BirdTrack so I’m sure if anything can be gleened from this data the real scientists will have a far more scientific and useful approach to analysing it!

If nothing else I have created some colourful graphs to keep Mark happy!