Well, this wasn’t so much a festival as a “small gig at an intimate venue”, but for this location the number and variety of waders present today was quite impressive. A misty start to the morning turned into a pleasant, sunny day and having seen a good number of birds on monday at Swinemoor I thought it would be worth another look, particularly as the rain on tuesday was likely to have increased the flooding; and it seems I was right.

First of all I came across a few Redwings and some Blue Tits, then I found an attractive white fungus which I took a bunch of photos of.

After this artistic moment I walked along to view the birds on the floods. At first the bright sunlight made viewing the birds a problem and I could only make out the larger species – about 250 Lapwings and 32 Golden Plovers, along with 37 Black-headed Gulls and 4 Common Gulls. Moving along a little a flock of Starlings moved off and amongst them I could see at least 7 Ruff, so I moved off after them.

At Swinemoor there is a stone bridge which crosses the Beverley-Barmston Drain and as I approached this some horses disturbed the group of Ruff which flew off in the company of a Curlew Sandpiper – I could easily see the white rump. I followed the Curlew Sandpiper until it landed where it joined a group of other small waders. These birds were close enough for me to make out that the Curlew Sand was an immature bird along with a dozen or so Dunlin. Scanning to look for other species I came across 2 Little Stints foraging alongside each other, these too were juveniles and I was becoming quite impressed how many good birds there were. From my right I heard the call of a Curlew and quickly spotted it coming in to land followed by a Sparrowhawk! The Sparrowhawk, however, was chased off by a Lapwing – if only I could capture these moments on video.

Well, whilst these thoughts were in my mind I had an amazing stroke of luck: 2 birds came in to land about 40 feet away from me. I raised by binoculars to see that one was a Ruff and the other a Pectoral Sandpiper! I took a good look at this bird, making sure that I’d identified it correctly before realising I had my camera with me. Hastily I took a couple of shots through my binoculars before studying the bird in more detail.

After a few minutes of this both birds flew off and I followed them to their next resting place. The Pectoral Sandpiper began feeding alongside the Dunlin, Little Stints and Curlew Sandpiper so for a short time I had all these species in my field of view.

Whilst watching these species lots of Snipe were busy chasing each other around and a pair of Mute Swans crash landed in the floods, which I guess they thought were a little deeper than they really were.

Walking around the common I continued to get views of all these species and kept flushing up large numbers of Meadow Pipits and a few Skylarks. At the far end of the common I found another Ruff; this time and adult male in winter plumage – and that was about it as far as birds were concerned.