A walk along the promenade

Today's Guardian Country Diary describes a visit to the coast just north of the mouth of the river Wear at Sunderland. 

Roker pier, at the mouth of the river, is a good place to watch turnstones that hang around waiting to pick up tit-bits that anglers on the pier drop when they re-bait their hooks. These birds have become remarkably tame, unlike their conspecifics a little further along the coast (see below) that are far more wary.

The first hint of a fishing line being reeled in and food becoming available and the turnstones close in ....

A little further along the coast, at Cannonball Rocks, there's a promenade cafe where you can get more than a splash of milk in your cup of tea if you're not careful, but it's a sunny, sheltered spot to sit and watch shipping entering and leaving the harbour....

.... and to warm your hands around a mug of tea.

As soon as you get onto the promenade at Seaburn you meet these very attentive flocks of starlings .....

.... loitering around the benches, waiting for someone to chuck them a chip from their fish 'n' chips. There's a bit of a dependency culture developing amongst some bird species along this coast.

Our destination was Whitburn rocks, always a good place to watch waders as the rising tide pushes them further up the beach. This little group of sanderlings raced down the beach following every retreating wave, picking up invertebrates, .....

....then raced back again, just keeping ahead of boiling surf that threatened to engulf them

At this end of the promenade turnstones behave the way they are supposed to behave, flipping over seaweed and stones in their hunt for food.

The rich mottled brown plumage on their backs blends with the piles of wracks and kelps, providing ...

... excellent camouflage, in comparision to paler sanderlings that were forced to join them in the pools between the piles of seaweeds, while they waited for the tide to fall and expose their preferred sandy habitat again.

If you just sit on the shingle beach here and wait for the tide to push the sanderlings towards you they approach quite closely, but they move so fast that the closer they get, the harder they are to follow. Lovely little birds, though.

And finally, more free-loading birds - gulls following an inshore fishing boat as it heads out of the Wear into the North Sea on the flood tide.

What does it feel like to swallow a live crab...?

 After yesterday's gales the sea was a tad choppy along the Roker seafront at Sunderland today.....

.... but with reassuring British fortitude this couple were taking afternoon tea on the promenade as the waves smacked into the sea wall...

 .... meanwhile, in the sheltered mouth of the River Wear this eider duck was fishing for crabs .....

..... spending quite a while manoeuvring this one into the right position in its beak so that it could swallow it in one gulp. I wonder what it feels like to swallow a live (and very angry) crab?

Meanwhile, the rough seas and rising tide had driven the turnstones up onto the promenade .......

.... where the starlings were taking a bath in the puddles left by yesterday's torrential rain.

A Stroll to the End of the Pier

It was a perfect summer afternoon, so we decided to take a stroll to the end of Tynemouth pier and discovered that it was a favourite spot for common terns to take a break and indulge in a bit of preening....

... which is necessary if you spend most of your life diving head-first into the sea every few minutes.

Only a brief respite though, and now they were in tip-tip shape time it was time to get back to work....

.... feeding the juveniles that were parked at intervals all along the pier.

Demanding work...

.. so the parent birds' feet hardly touched the ground ...

... while their were feeding their offspring, which ....

...apart from occasionally staggering to their feet for a stretch, just sunbathed.

This herrring gull had the temerity to land near a chick and the parent bird carried out relentless attacks until the gull was driven off, which is maybe why ....

... this turnstone tip-toed past PDQ, fearful that it would be in for the same treatment.

A small flock of redshanks, driven off the Black Middens rocks at the mouth of the Tyne by the rising tide, landed in the pier briefly....

... but didn't settle for long before the terns drove them off too.

The terns even had a go at this guillemot, swimming innocently by, but it showed them a clean pair of heels.

Cold Enough to Freeze the Toes off a Turnstone

This turnstone that had lost all its toes on both feet was running around on the beach at Seaburn last weekend. It had no toes on either foot, which leads me to wonder whether it had hatched like that and that the defect might be a genetically-controlled developmental abnormality, rather than the result of an accident. It didn't seem to inhibit the bird's movement at all, although moving around on slippery rocks to flip stones over might have been a challenge. Check out the distinctive footprints.........

Christmas Dinner in a Bun

A combination of cabin fever, after too many days of snow, and a burning desire to break the mould of our typical Christmas led us to take our Christmas dinner in picnic form today, on the seafront at Tynemouth. And mighty fine it was too; glorious sunshine for a post-picnic walk along to North Shields fish quay and back. Two of the beneficiaries of our alfresco Christmas dinner were this black-headed gull............

...and this feral pigeon - both fine specimens of nature's waste disposal units.

The walk to North Shields yielded this handsome curlew...and......

... numerous oystercatchers whose beaks almost glowed in the low-angle winter sunshine and which....

....hopped with great aplomb from rock to rock, plus........

.... this crow that had found its own Christmas dinner that it had to defend against some pretty fierce-looking...

...great black-backed gulls..... while, also in black-and-white, up at the fish quay we came across this....

... grubby-looking pied wagtail, looking for scraps, and a...

... drake eider swimming .........

amongst the trawlers that were in harbour for Christmas. Then, on the way back we passed .....

... turnstones, that seemed to have added de-icing grit to their diet, and ....

... this very smartly turned-out redshank, complete with leg ring. But, best of all, there were scores of these wonderful...

... golden plovers, whose feather edges literally glowed golden in the afternoon sunlight. In about three and a half months I'll be listening to their plaintive calls as they begin to arrive back on their breeding grounds on Chapel Fell in Weardale.

A Christmas day to remember.

Merry Christmas to all........