More Caspian Gulls, 22nd August

The only real success I seem to be having in local birding currently is on the tips and pits east of Peterborough, scouring the large gulls for a bit of cachinnans action. No gulls at Dogsthorpe today due to disturbance (perhaps the falconers had been back). Tanholt however was bustling, and there was plenty of turnover on the pit by the footpath - all in all, must have been 750 or so large gulls. Despite this, Mike Weedon, Will Bowell and I couldn't pick up anything amongst the birds regularly coming to bathe on the pit. So we headed round to the tip, where I soon picked up a couple of Caspian Gulls - the 2cy bird below, and a brief adult:



Views weren't exactly ideal on the tip today, viewing through the fence with alot of heat haze (as you can probably tell from the above). So we were pretty delighted when most of the gulls were flushed off the tip and ended up flying back on to the pit. Needless to say, the 2cy Caspian showed very well for a few minutes:




No sign of the adult though; guess it was still on the tip. The only other gull of note was this 2cy Yellow-legged, looking slightly odd and dumpy without fully-grown primaries:




I've now had 4 Caspian Gulls in Peterborough in the past week. They are evidently on the move.