Polling Day

After receiving a wire from Duckers News International concerning the reappearance of the Slavonian Grebes at Flint on Sunday evening, I nipped down to the point for a quick look over lunch.

Conditions were a touch on the inclement side to say to least, but the emergence of the Wirral shore through the murk and sleety/snowy/rainy stuff (where’s an Eskimo with one of those twenty words for different types of snow when you need one) provided encouragement of improved conditions to come.

After getting intimate with a silver birch, I began to scan the incoming tide which produced a good count of one hundred and fifty Teal, four Little Grebes, one Great Crested Grebe, a survey vessel, but no Slavs.

Some loud chu-chu-chuing then alerted me to a passing rabble of circa twenty Lesser Redpoll moving through the treetops, tailed loosely by a small number of Chaffinch.

Unfortunately the weather that had earlier promised to perk up suddenly worsened and the previously visible Thurstaston cliffs vanished behind a wall of snowfall powered by a strengthening north-easterly. One final cursory scan across the channel again failed to produce the goods, so I admitted defeat and returned to the motor.

It looks like the ‘widespread frost’ that developed into a ‘cold snap’ before morphing into a ‘big freeze’ is now being referred to as the ‘deep freeze’. I wonder what the next phrase in the cold weather escalation scale is – any ideas? Answers on a postcard…

Until later.