A Taste of all Seasons ... Great flocks of Pinkfeet and Golden Plovers ... singing Song Thrush and Dunnock ...

With wall to wall sunshine on the Solway yesterday and with no more than a hint of a breeze it felt positively spring-like ... the big flocks of wintering birds told a different story ... it was good to see around a thousand Golden Plovers inhabiting the wet mudflats on the bend of the River Wampool at Anthorn which has recently been much less of a magnet for birds than it was just a few years ago ...

... never completely settled, they lifted nervously from time to time before returning to the same spot ...

'Golden' seemed a very appropriate epithet as the early afternoon sunshine caught them side-on ...

At Siddick Pond a Song Thrush was singing a slightly strange but powerful and rather halting song that had me pause for a moment and certainly attracted the attention of local dog walkers who wanted to know what bird that was ...

... the song was rather a 'work in progress' typical of this early stage of spring and what The Sound Approach dubbed 'plastic song' as they explored the development of song and brought greater understanding to the process that Nicholson and Koch had discussed in 1936 when  the term 'subsong ' was first used ( The Sound Approach to Birding; Mark Constantine & The Sound Approach 2006 ).

On the main pond a family party of five Whooper Swans fed in among a dozen or so Mute Swans and a group of Goosanders dived repeatedly in a display of co-ordinated fishing ...

The sea at Workington was glassy and unremarkable save for a steady stream of Cormorants coming in from an unusually south westerly direction rather than simply flying north along the coast as they normally do ... were they perhaps returning from the Scottish side ?

By the outfall pipe the regular wintering Mediterranean Gull roosted along with a few Black-headed Gulls, some adults and some first-winter birds in varying degrees of advancement ...

With the tide well out at Allonby Bay, some gulls loafed along the distant shore ... Black-headed, Common and Herring in the main ... and a group of Oystercatchers preened ...

... the two birds on the left were in full summer plumage while the others were second calendar-year birds showing white 'cut throats' and bills of muted colour with darker tips ...

... way out on the sea several flocks of around fifty Wigeon floated languidly ...

Pinkfeet were on the move in the Wedholme Flow area ... always managing to settle in distant and inaccessible rushy fields ...

The Anthorn masts field was host to another three thousand or so Golden Plovers along with a scattering of Lapwings, Starlings and tucked away among a straggly patch of rushes a party of four Ruff picked constantly among the vegetation ...

... raising their heads only occasionally ...

A bank of black cloud loomed out to the west blotting out the sinking sun and casting sudden gloom over the Campfield Scrape where a very fluffed-up Little Egret walked towards the water's edge ...

... and flew over the pool where some Teal lingered and a party of Snipe probed among the emergent sedges ...