A grey day

Sorry, must have nodded off there for a month or so. Truth is I haven't been out much with the camera since my last post, and there hasn't really been a lot of light to play with: we seem to have been swaddled under a blanket of greyness for several weeks now in Dorset, the monotony of it all broken only by occasional rain. Fortunately, some birds still look good in these conditions, and the Great Northern Diver is one of them. This one was hanging out off Portland marina on Saturday.

I had gone down to Portland Harbour partly in the hope of seeing a Black-throated Diver which had spent most of the week in the same area. The Black-throat was nowhere to be seen, but as I took one last walk up the windswept harbour wall to look for it, a small wader in flight caught my eye and materialised into a Grey Phalarope - a good bird to find, especially in December. It landed briefly on the water, and stayed just long enough for me to get the attention of Brett and Chris, the only other two birders to see it before it flew off high to the north. The Grey Phalarope was my 236th species photographed in 2015 - I wonder if it will be the last.