First port of call was the Ynyslas turn 'carpark' where we emerged blinking into the light and watched a rock pipit fly catching on the wooden sea wall. On reaching the wall, the exposed sand in front of us had small groups of feeding sanderling, ringed plover and oystercatcher, which prompted Steffi to grab her camera and adopt her customary belly-crawl technique across the soggy beach to capture them on film. I took the easier, and far more sensible approach, by setting up the scope and scanning the sea, where large rafts of common scoter bobbed around. Failing to find anything unusual amongst them apart from 2 great crested grebes, I checked the tideline and noticed a very close female scoter feeding in the waves - turning the scope on her I was delighted when an equally close male long tailed duck popped up next to her. By now Steffi had returned and fixing on its location, went off again to try and get some pics - not easy in the dipping swell, and the bird was drifting further out with each second, but she at least got some reasonable record shots.
After that treat, we headed to the River Clettwr to walk the embankment to the saltmarsh. Lots of lapwing, teal, wigeon, golden plover, curlew, redshank and snipe along the way, occasionally rising in great swirling flocks, looking fantastic in the late afternoon sunlight. A kingfisher kept zipping up and down the river and a sighting of 3 meadow pipits had us slighty anxious for a spell, with one of them showing obvious white mantle steaks and behaving in different manner to the other two. Thoughts of red throated kept popping into my head, but try as we might, we had to concede it was just a slightly odd looking meadow. The day ended on a high, when retracing our steps back to the car, a two pronged attack took place on the assembled waders with a ringtail hen harrier and a peregrine panicking the flocks.
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