Sandside Common Gulls

I spent today at the other end of Cumbria, on the Solway looking across to Dumfries in Scotland. We visted Silloth Golf Club to look at how management of the course is benefitting the dune heath vegetation found in the roughs. An ecologist would find this interesting, but it makes a pretty dull looking blip, so I haven't used any photos taken here.

We later spent some time at Grune Point, a sand spit that projects into the Solway Firth. The issue here is active erosion of the sand dunes because there is no sand moving up the coast beyond Silloth Docks. Without going into too much detail, this gives us a dilemma as to what we do about this part of a protected wildlife site.

There is a house on the sand spit. With sea level rise from global warming together with the eroding frontal dunes, this property is very much threatened by inundation on very high tides. The owner is going to great lengths to protect his house by reinforcing the sea wall with large stone blocks (not shown). But this is inevitably a losing battle.

The house at Grune Point was going to be the blip until I drove home. On the Kent estuary at Sandside there were huge numbers of common gulls, massed along the sinuous line of the water's edge. This gull species breeds in only small numbers in Cumbria, so this will be a flock of birds that have bred further north in Britain or Europe. They will probably not stay in the Kent estuary in these numbers for very long.

This is just another illustration of the constantly changing nature of this estuarine environment, and perhaps explains why I am always drawn back to it, and why estuarine blips from here figure so heavily in this journal.