Elementary my dear Leach's

The Safari is embarrassed to tell you that we dropped a huge bollard yesterday! The morning weather forecast was for a raging south westerly gale with rain coming on early afternoon., high tide was mid to late morning - that should have been enough to tell us to get down to the Prom for high tide and watch it down. But no, for some bizarre reason we had a bee in our bonnet about going to Stanley Park to see if we could come across the Ring Necked Parakeet that's been hanging around there for the last couple of weeks or so. Why???????????? Was the parakeet likely to come out of its hiding hole in a rampant gale, possibly not, would there be any Treecreepers out, probably not - are there any still there since so many of the big crinkly barked trees have been felled this year, really hope we haven't lost them as a breeding species in town but it may have happened. As it happened we saw neither, in fact in the wooded areas we saw very little and heard even less apart from the noise of the wind whipping the treetops around.

In desperation more than anything else we had a look at the lake. There wasn't a single gull on the rail, usually it's shoulder to shoulder on there. A Cormorant was all there was to be seen, on the 'wrong side of the light' as always.

This morning we were up north on the top of Rossall Tower with the Living Seas Wildlife Trust team helping out with a seawatch. The wind had swung round to the north west which is a duff direction for sea-birds along our coast and so it proved to be. We saw very little although a big bull Grey Seal hauled out on the new shingle island that is King's Scar. Also on there were around two dozen Eiders, a big flock of roosting Oystercatchers and Cormorants. It took a while but eventually between all the watchers present it was decided that the 'other seal' wasn't a seal but a lump of seal-like driftwood. Had us guessing most of the morning until it didn't move when the tide started washing over it.

This afternoon we had a stroll round the nature reserve but being a windy afternoon there was little to be found. All we could point the camera at were these few autunmal Oak leaves.

It really was that quiet!

Where to next? Not sure where we'll be on safari tomorrow but we could well be looking at some wildlife somewhere. 

In the meantime let us know who's making all the elementary mistakes in your outback.