On the beach

With apologies to Neville Shute: the Bastion Point area does look a bit as though it has been nuked.

On 25 January I thought that I was feeling sufficiently over shingles (in a physical sense - I have been psychologically over the disease for several weeks) to go to Bastion Point Beach with Frances.  She had been a couple of times and had reported it to be quite interesting although the sand was very high.

All true.

Walking next to the breakwater my first observation was that there were lots of crabs there.  Some of them were on rocks 2 m above the sand.

 A particularly colourful crab.

 Lots of large shellfish including abalone, shield limpet and tritons.

 I have never seen a double-decker abalone before.  Somehow it made me think of McDonalds!

 Going round the corner on to Tip Beach I was quite excited by these Cormorants.  The overall whiteness of the one on the left made me think "Pied Cormorant".

That was confirmed on looking at the photograph.  Sorry these two photos are so blurry but the show the crucial features.

 The middle specimen turns out to be a Black-faced Cormorant!

Overall I had all 5 likely Cormorant species within about 500 m.  It would have been nice for a Darter to also be present.

Behind the Cormorants there was a lot of Shearwater action.  The balance of probabilities was Short-tailed Shearwaters, feeding on a school of bait fish.