Another horrible hot sticky day with a very light SW>2 making it near impossible to scope the shoreline by the afternoon with the dreaded long lens heat distortion, or heat shimmer as I call it, amongst other things. The heat shimmer makes it impossible to take photos anywhere near acceptable in an open area where the sun or high temperatures heat up surfaces such as water, sand, mud, stone and even grass and the heat transmitted from them distorts the air waves. When you use a long lens at distance this magnifies the distortion giving you a blurred, distorted image.
The only advise the experts can give to this problem is, get your photos before the sun has time to heat up the surfaces and after that leave your camera in the car and forget it. Other than that show the distorted image as a record shot and say thats the way it was.
A full scope around this morning early doors found all the Dunlins gone as well as the Ringed plovers leaving just the usual Common Sandpipers and Redshanks along with 7 Oystercatchers and around 30 big gulls.
Nearing the end of the morning watch a group of small dark waders dropped in from the east with 1 showing up much whiter. They landed at distance but in the SE corner well hidden in among the ponds. With a lot of patience they slowly started to appear and as expected they were Dunlin but then the whiter bird appeared being a Ringed Plover.
After struggling to get some photos I was looking through the viewfinder and saw a second bird so thinking there was 2 Ringed I got more photos only to find the other bird was a Little Ringed, a real bonus bird for this location. The Little Ringed was still present this afternoon along with 6 Dunlin but no sign of the Ringed although most of the waders were head in wing under the shoreline hard and fast asleep.
A Cuckoo was calling from down in the valley both a.m and p.m.
BS