Mid to Late May

Late May on the Solway turned out to be a real Skua fest with totals reaching 213 Pomarine skua, 19 Long Tailed including a flock of 9, 45 Artics and 13 Great Skuas passed by on strong SW winds, numbers for specific days are detailed in the table here.

Other good birds were also seen with my reward for getting the tide time wrong and starting skua watching very early on the 18/5 being a Spoonbill flying from the Scotch side over to Campfield Marsh where it remained to dusk.

Another aspect of the seawatching on the 18/5/09 was that the strong wind produced 35+ Manx Shearwaters, including 22 together, an uncommon bird in the Inner Solway.


Away from the sea virtually the only thing of interest reported was a Hobby with Swifts over Carlisle on the 28/5/09.

It was good to see that the Marsh Fritillary butterflies were flying in good numbers starting on the 22/5 with 3 the warm last week of May saw good numbers, this was also true of White Faced Darters at their North Cumbrian site

One of the high point for me recently has being able to watch 3 Otters on the River Eden near Rockliffe on warm evenings, attempts at photography can be seen one of which shows the Otters attempts to retain its catch of a huge eel which has wrapped itself around the Otters body.