My tern today.

Tonight is the start of Tish's block of four night shifts - always the worst one as you sleep the night before and then try and "bank" some sleep during the day so you can function over night. The shifts are slightly shorter than in Aberdeen (only 9pm to 7.30am) and the travel time is much shorter - ten minutes rather than an hour so I don't thin they are being met with as much dismay as they used to be.
As we still have not heard about Tish's car she is taking the Landcruiser, she will be back in time for me to take the children to school.
I made the most of the tides this morning and went up to Buffalo Creek. The tide was starting to drop which meant that everything was concentrated into a couple of roost sites - luckily it was a perfect height to allow me to get to a position to watch the roosts. It was shaping up to be a really good morning as well - lots of birds, but unfortunately a fisher man with a small camera was determined to get a photo of the 12 pelicans that were on the beach and flushed the birds on several occasions. Still I managed to get a good hour searching through them before they had had enough and scattered along the coast.
The terns were the definate highlight with eight species identified, although I did not get time to work through all of the smaller ones so I may have missed one or two things. That said I found Caspian, Crested, Lesser Crested, Gull-billed (100+), Whiskered, Common, Little and the high light one Black-naped.

 Caspian and one Gull-billed

 Crested

 Lesser Crested and Gull-billed

Gull-billed.

Unfortunately I did not really get to look through the waders - there were atleast 100 Great Knot and 40+ Sandplovers - the majority of which I am sure were greater but one looked wrong but they were all flushed before I could check properly.

The other main highlight was superb views of Rose Crowned Fruit Dove which I managed to get in the camera but only to managed to get a shot of where it had been as it flew off.

Everyone is in school tomorrow and Tish will be sleeping so I shall be back out hoping to get some better pictures.