Turned out all white

At lunchtime today , I was sat in the Oddie hide with Graeme Bowman and Les Robson contemplating heading home to watch the Newcastle match and eat last nights cold pizza when Graeme got a muffled call about an ivory gull at Seahouses.

We were soon on our way and this is what greeted us when we arrived at the golf course.

A stunning juvenile ivory gull, which showed incredibly well, thankfully the course was too flooded for it to be bothered by golfers.

The assembled crowd watched as it took off and headed south and almost in unison shouted 'there's two of them' with various expletives rightly added. They called to each other and continued south together. Amazing. Congratulations to Gary Woodburn on another great find.

As regular readers of this tosh will know, I rarely twitch, because when I do I don't see the bird, so it nice to twitch a bird and see two!

The 'Seahouses-two' were relocated on the beach at Annstead and everyone enjoyed further views of them on the rocks before the tide pushed them off and they flew off north.

A new bird for me and a lot of the Northumbrian birders there, the last being in Seahouses in 1979. This takes my county list to 311.

There was little doing at Druridge before I left. There wasn't a bird on the sea, all the divers from last week have gone (tell a lie, there was a single shag). On the big pool there were two long-tailed ducks.

Outside of the patch at Hemscotthill links the finch flock had about 40 twite among it. I scanned them for colour-rings without success. There were tree sparrows, reed buntings and strangely a rock pipit amongst the linnets, goldfinches, chaffinches and twite.

I would love get access to the Hemscothill Links to woosh that finch flock.