The day brightened up a bit after the rain showers of late afternoon. One good thing about rain is it tends to clear up the heat haze from the sea and make the bird watching much easier. So there have been a lot of good sea-watching opportunities this week. On most evenings now, and for next month or so the sea is alive as the seabirds shuttle back and forward to feed their chicks. The manx shearwaters reappeared this week for the summer, joining the usual auks, kittiwakes and gannets. We don’t have manx shearwaters breeding anywhere nearby. They travel great distances though during their search for food when not on incubation duty or when feeding chicks, circuiting literally around the British Isles. All the birds this week passed Crail going to the east so if our ideas about them are true then they were going clockwise back home. They were perhaps heading back to the big colonies on the west coast or around the Irish Sea.
Razorbill – one of the thousands of seabirds passing back and forth past Crail every day at the moment as chick feeding starts in earnest
Wild Crail 
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