Porthgwarra sea watch - Sun 7th Aug

I took Matt, our friend's 11 year old son, for his first sea watch on Sunday morning. Matt, a young keen new birder,his dad Ray, and I headed to Porthgwarra for a couple of hours, to see what we could see.

No one wanted an early start do we didn't arrive until 10am and there were half a dozen birders already there. We were informed it had been good for a few hours with good numbers or Corys passing and 2 Great Shearwaters. (I knew we should have got up at 5am!) Fingers crossed it would continue.

In the following two hours a steady stream of Manx's passed through, and after about 45 mins we had our first Corys. It was not easy at first getting Matt on to them (we only had my scope) but we soon got into the swing of things, lining up birds to pass through. The undoubted highlight was a Cory's Shearwater about a third of the way out to the Runnelstone. It slowly passed from east to west providing cracking views as it lazily flew along.

In total in two hours we had:

200+ Manxs
6 Cory's
2 Pom Skuas
1 Arctic Skua
1 Sooty Shearwater
2 Puffin
2 Balearic Shearwater
1 Common Scoter

Amazing!