First, the colour-ringed Med Gull at Cogden Beach on Wednesday evening. It was ringed as a pullus at Pagham Harbour in June last year, and went on a winter vacation to northern Spain before its reappearance on the S coast...
Almost certainly the same bird was a few miles east at Abbotsbury Swannery earlier the same day, but flew off before the ring could be read, and as UK-ringed Med Gulls are apparently very scarce in Dorset I am pleased that it stayed local for long enough to give us another chance.
Secondly, garden birding...
Despite easing of the lockdown I have kept going with the BWKM0 list (Bird Watching at Kilometre Zero, in case you needed reminding) for no other reason than the fact that it's been fun. The whole enterprise has added immeasurable enjoyment to my local birding. For starters it is responsible for my entry into the world of nocmig, and that has been simply brilliant! But more fundamentally it has got me thinking about - curious about - my really local birds, those I can see or hear from home. For example, without BWKM0 I wouldn't have noticed that Greenfinch is seemingly hard to come by at NQS Manor, but boy, have I struggled to get it on the list! Finally I managed a nice male earlier this month, but had to scope a distant apple tree in order to see it. However, the very same day that Greenfinch fell, something rather more bizarre also happened...
Back in the spring I spent a lot of time skywatching from the garden. With the arrival of summer my efforts in this area dwindled massively, but on Greenfinch Day I was at it again. Around lunchtime I spotted a few gulls off to the west and raised my bins for a proper look. I could barely believe it when one of them was a Fulmar! In leisurely fashion it cruised off in a more-or-less westerly direction and out of view. I would imagine it skirted the northern edge of Bridport itself. If this had been my first encounter with a from-the-garden Fulmar (bearing in mind I live three miles from the sea) I would have had it all over the blog that same evening. But it wasn't. NQS readers might recall the previous occasion, which was so astounding that I felt the need for upper-case lettering and exclamation marks.
So, what's going on? There is no question that in this neck of the woods an inland Fulmar is a rare thing. And when I say 'inland' I mean almost any appreciable distance from the sea. For example, The Birds of Devon (Tyler, 2010) lists just ten 'inland records' and one of those reads as follows: '2007 One circling a mile inland from Seaton, 30 April'. A mile inland! That's all. Virtually anywhere away from the sea is quite clearly a highly unusual event in Devon. The Birds of Dorset (Green, 2004) says that Fulmars '...are occasionally seen inside Poole and Christchurch Harbours and flying over sites close to the coast such as Radipole and Lodmoor NRs.' It also cites a handful of what it refers to as 'more unusual sightings'. These include one over Stoborough, near Wareham (approx 5 miles from the sea but less than 2 from Poole Harbour) and another over Holdenhurst Road in Boscombe (approx 2 miles from the sea) - both June records. You get the picture though - if these sightings are sufficiently noteworthy to be included individually in the county avifauna, they are very unusual indeed.
What can I say? First, I wasn't seeing things. It was most definitely a Fulmar, though unfortunately already a bit too distant when I spotted it to consider a photo. A Twitter contact suggested that I check local quarries! Inland nesting is very much a thing with Fulmars elsewhere in the country, so I did check. Not physically, but I checked the literature, and a Somerset contact kindly let me know the situation in that county too. And no, there are no inland, quarry-nesting Fulmars nearby. Was it prospecting then? I doubt it. I think it was nothing more than a very bizarre coincidence. To see one, even slightly-inland Fulmar in Dorset, or our near neighbour Devon, is a once-in-a-blue-moon event. For that bird to be three miles inland, and visible from your garden, even more so. For that to happen twice (May 22nd and July 6th, 2020) is just ridiculous. If it ever happens again, I will have to assume it is the same, slightly crazy, local bird, on a massive, massive wind up...
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