I managed to get to Pennington Flash roost for the first time this afternoon.The window to make the most of the roost is quite small, normally gulls start to gather from around 14:00 but the light goes by 16:00. I don't finish work until 15:00 at the earliest, so my chances to watch the roost are limited to weekends.
Today the light was excellent, no wind and a reasonable number of gulls (eventually). The best place to watch the roost is usually the opposite side of the flash to the nature reserve so that's where I headed. At 14:30 conditions were perfect as you can see below.
I was joined at around 15:00 by another regular and we set about checking through the birds. There were around 7000 Black-headed Gulls and a few hundred each of Common, Herring and Lesser Black-backed. Two or three Great Black-backed gulls were also present. What I was really hoping for though was something a bit different. There have been a couple of Mediterranean Gulls recently, an odd Iceland Gull and two or three Yellow-legged Gulls. I had seen what I thought was a 3rd winter YLG just after I had arrived, but at a considerable distance, near the hide on the opposite side. John, the other birder, confirmed that a YLG had indeed been where I'd seen my bird as he'd been in the hide at the time. After about 20mins John picked it up again a bit closer, perched on a buoy. Ten minutes or so later John found another bird, an adult much closer. This bird was incredibly clean and was a great individual to study and compare with the other Herring and LBB Gulls.
I managed a few phoneskoped shots which I think just about show the key features - obvious darker mantle, white head and longer winged than the Herring Gulls. The spot on the Gonys was also very obvious but doesn't really show up in these photos.
Unfortunately nothing else of interest turned up but it has piqued my interest for the rest of the winter, and I expect I'll be back a few times as the year goes on.
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