A change from Elmley today. As part of the ongoing monitoring of important bird populations in the Medway & Swale estuaries, the RSPB carries out bird counts on the Medway that go towards the British Trust for Ornithology's Wetland Bird Survey (WeBS). In order to cover the many off-shore islands in the Medway, we use a boat to do the counts and today Nat & I were joined by Andy & Jason from Northward Hill to form the crew to carry out todays count. It wasn't too unpleasant, although a northerly wind is never a favourite. Launching at the Kingsferry bridge, we zipped back up the river on a rising tide to count the inner group of islands, which include the RSPB reserve at Nor Marsh
Highlights here included 6 red-breasted mergansers off Nor & a kingfisher at Hoo island. A marsh harrier was hunting over Nor, spooking the 1200 dunlin & smaller numbers of grey plover, turnstone, redshank, teal & wigeon.Finishing the counts around the "inner group" of islands, we headed back down-stream to Burntwick island. The tide looked bigger than forecast, so I suspect many waders were roosting ashore, but there were still some reasonably impressive flocks. Two surprises in this area were a shag, a species we record less than annually; and a bonxie, a species that I've never previously seen on a Medway count! There were one or two other skuas seen on the North Kent coast today, so clearly still a few stragglers in the North Sea.

 Great skua (or bonxie) - River Medway 23/11/2010 

Some selected highlights of the latter part of the count included totals of 4300 dunlin, 1035 knot, 674 black-tailed godwit & 635 grey plover. Wildfowl included 1000 wigeon, 700 teal & 600 brents. There looked to be another impressive avocet roost in Funton Creek, but we only caught the last 3-400 dropping out of sight behind Barksore. Raptors were 3 seperate peregrines, half a dozen marsh harriers & a buzzard over Chetney Marsh. By this time, we'd been afloat for getting on 4 hours and the chill was starting to seep in. Actually, who am I kidding?  We were freezing! So back to the launch site & home to Kingshill for a well-deserved cuppa.