After a night of severe tropical storms with the usual, heavy rain, thunder and lightning the weather remained throughout the morning and put a stop to covering the run off of the tide at dawn. Photo above shows a wet and grey Yangkou harbour as seen from my hotel room window.
The weather remained bad but a window of clear rain free weather allowed a visit to the area of mudflats mid afternoon to witness to run up of the high tide but the weather closed in again soon enough. I tried to take shelter from a nearby boat and as I started scanning there was at least 4 adult nordmans greenshank Including the bird above.
Great knot's began to appear with at least 440+ birds roosting on the mudflats as the height of the tide didn't cover all up all of the mudflats. This allowed prolonged scanning which enabled me to locate this engraved, yellow flag ringed bird the letters LNN (photo above) details of this bird are: Great Knot LNN first banded 25/11/08 in Roebuck Bay age 2+ & last seen 25/03/11 by myself & Adrian Boyle! First overseas sighting...well done! Below shows the only spoon billed sandpiper of he tide that just ran in to and out of my scope as I was scanning. I managed to follow the bird for just on 10 minutes before loosing it in amongst the other waders and the weather turned real bad with more heavy rain and strong winds.
