30th November - 1st December

Caught the overnight ferry down to Aberdeen, arriving before first light; we got to Lunan Bay at dawn but a few hours scanning in the glorious, calm, sunny conditions failed to produce the drake Black Scoter that has been seen on and off there in amongst the hundreds of Common Scoter, Velvet Scoter, Red-breasted Mergansers, Slavonian Grebes, Red-throated Divers and Long-tailed Ducks (but the sun was coming up right in front of us).   There was also thousands of Common and Black-headed Gulls, a Merlin and a small pod of Bottlenose Dolphins at the mouth of the bay, we then went south to have a look at the Tay Reedbeds but we didn’t see any Bearded Tits with the only thing of interest being a Red Squirrel sat right next to a Grey Squirrel – the first time I’ve seen them together!   

After a night in Edinburgh we had a few hours at Musselburgh where, despite it being low tide birds included a drake Surf Scoter with a few Velvet Scoter, the usual Slavonian Grebes, Long-tailed Ducks etc and a Kingfisher on the River Esk (only my second one in Scotland).   The highlight for me though was reading four darvic ringed Black-headed Gulls in amongst the thousands of Gulls on the river and exposed shore – all from very different areas:

Black / White X35C - Ringed at Island Bohmke, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern in NE Germany as a breeding bird on 13th May 2017.

White / Black 2ATT – Ringed as a chick in the Moorfoot Hills, East Lothian on 11^th June 2016.

Yellow / Black 2PFR – Ringed at Pitsea landfill Site, Essex on 12^th March 2016 (also seen at Musselburgh in October 2016).

Green / White JLN8 – Ringed in Oslo, Norway on 26^th March 2018.

Dawn at Lunan Bay

Bar-tailed Godwits

Goldeneye at Musselburgh

Kingfisher