Should've gone to Start

Conditions looked promising for a seawatch on Sunday morning, so I picked up Laurie at 7am and we headed to Teignmouth. We both watched from 07:20 until 11:40 when I had to leave to play cricket (which surprisingly went ahead given the weather – I even scored 25 runs!) whilst Laurie stayed for a couple of hours longer.  As the title hints at, we didn’t even begin to approach the quality and quantity seen off the various headlands further south. Most birds were well offshore, with almost all the shearwaters at least 2km out, and undoubtedly many more passed beyond our visible range. Nevertheless we came up with the following (all heading south):

3 Balearic Shearwaters, 108 Manx Shearwaters, 22 Fulmars, 5 Mediterranean Gulls (an adult and four juveniles, including four together), 31 Common Scoters and 3 skua sp (most probably two Great and an Arctic, but too distant to be 100% certain).

Juvenile & adult Mediterranean Gulls

I watched again this morning between 09:05 - 11:05 and got 4 Balearic Shearwaters, 2 Arctic Skuas close in, 1 Mediterranean Gull, 1 Common Gull and four "commic" terns south.

I think we would probably need a strong southeasterly gale combined with significant movement further down the English Channel to be in with a shot of one of the rarer shearwaters off Teignmouth. Though to be honest, I probably wouldn’t be able to confidently ID a Yelkouan Shearwater unless it flew over the pier waving a “I’m a Yelkouan” flag...