31 March: We started birding on Southerness this morning with 2 Whooper Swans heading east and a noisy flock of Barnacles feeding down near Powillimount in the fields near the beach. At the point a Goldcrest was calling from the bushes (surely a migrant?) and our first Sand Martin of the year flew north with a small movement of Meadow Pipits noted overhead too. The sea was good, even though the tide was dropping. Divers were well represented with at least 20 Red-throateds on the calm flat sea and single Black-throated and a hulking Great Northern. Female Long-tailed Duck in with the Mergansers was a bonus but best of all a Sandwich Tern feeding offshore. Three Purple Sandpipers on the rocks was a bonus considering the low tide.
Our next port of call was Auchenreoch where the raft of Tufties was much closer to the layby and included yesterday's potential rarity too. With good conditions we were able to observe the purple head sheen to the head, dark vermiculations on the pale grey mantle and also the bill pattern.
The black on the bill was certainly restricted to the nail, in fact in profile the black almost disappeared and the bill looked all grey.
In a head-on view the black could be seen easily but it was surrounded by a pale greyish-white colour - something that I did not remember on the bird near Stranraer that we saw earlier in the month. Indeed I cannot find it on any photos either, so I presume this is a different drake.
Drake Lesser Scaup, Auchenreoch Loch 31 March 2008.
We never saw the full wing bar on this bird but the secondary bar was definitely white as noted when the wing was partially spread. After a while it swam to the other side of the loch and promptly fell asleep so we called the bird in as a "probable" drake Lesser Scaup pending views of the fully spread wing.
Next we headed across to Laurieston seeing a couple of Red Kites and 200+ Fieldfares before taking the road down to Gatehouse of Fleet. Scanning across the valley produced one of the birds of the weekend in the form of a male Goshawk that even went into display briefly. The rest of the trip down to Gatehouse of Fleet was pretty quiet though as was a quick look at Carlingwark Loch near Castle Douglas. Our last stop of the weekend was at Seafield Bay, Annan where 300+ Golden Plovers were congregated but little else.D&G 2008 stands at 126 now.
