24 hours (and an inch of rain) make a difference

 The difficulty of birding from Captain Stevenson's Point recently has been the vast expanse of sand visible. I can't track down a recent photo of this as a 'before image but here is a snap from yesterday (25/10) to show a total lack of sand.  The banks are sort of visible as the areas with a yellow tinge.

The only waders visible in this view were 2 Masked Lapwings in a patch of Samphire near Goat Island and an Eastern Curlew on a clump of detritus towards the Wharf.  A flock of Bar-tailed Godwits and a few Red Knot were seen at the channel to the Mouth when looking over Devlin's Inlet.

That sight made me wonder what might be visible from the beach at Bastion Point so I took myself off there and walked out to the Mouth Channel.  The current through this channel was as vigorous as I have ever seen it!

Being a very intelligent person I had left my camera at home.  Closing in on the Nobel Prize for Stupidity I also left the adapter to connect my phone to my telescope in the car!  However I was able to line up the phone on the eyepiece to get a few record shots of about 50 of each of Red-capped Plovers and Red-necked Stints foraging in the Eel Grass washed up on the far side of the channel.  I had wondered where all the Plovers had gone.

Actually I step back from "record shots": they aren't that good, but they get the idea across.

To further illustrate the level of water in Bottom Lake on the way home I took this image of jetties at the Fisheries Jetty turn out.