Top - Saunders Gull.
Above - 2 Relict Gulls ( on the RIGHT).
After an invigorating 3 hours sleep, we were up at 4am for today's excursion to the Great Wall. Our hotel, the Beidiahe International Club was quite comfortable and welcome after our mammoth trek yesterday...
Three taxi's collected us at 4.30am and we drove about 40 minutes to the Great Wall north of Beidiahe. On route we had our first Chinese Pond Heron, 7 Little Egrets and 25+ Night Herons.
We hiked up the wall into the wooded hills until lunchtime, returning by chairlift as the crowds of locals began to build. Birds noted -
Many Yellow browed Warblers, 1 Common Rosefinch, 1 Japanese White Eye, 3 Red billed Blue Magpies, Hoopoe, 5+ Pere David's Laughing Thrush ( a site speciality recently split from Plain Laughing Thrush, known now to our group as Craig David's Laughing Thrush. Bo selector!), Dusky Warbler, Asian Brown Flycatcher, 3+ Chinese Hill Warbler ( another speciality), 4 Olive backed Pipits, 3 Godlewski's Bunting, 5+ Siberian Meadow Buntings, 8 Japanese Sparrowhawks, 1 Yellow bellied Tit, 8 Hobbies migrating, 50+ Chestnut flanked White Eye, 2 Blue Rock Thrushes of the red bellied race, philipinensis, Red rumped Swallows, Common Pheasant ( wild ones!), 1+ Black naped Oriole, 2 Grey capped Greenfinch, 3 Oriental Turtle Dove, 1 male Daurian Redstart, 1 male Brown Shrike, Long tailed Tit, 2 Chinese Bulbuls.
Above - Chinese Hill Warbler.
Above - Craig David's Laughing Thrush...
Visible migration over head included 9 Ashy Minivets, 1 female Pied Harrier, 12 Grey faced Buzzards and the Hobbies mentioned earlier.
At 4pm we were back at Beidaihe and decided to pop to the mudflats just across the road from our hotel. What a relief to find that the high tide had pushed some birds up close enough to view well - 5 Relict Gulls, 1 Saunders Gull ( one of the rarest larids in the world), 7 Black tailed Gulls, 2 Terek Sandpipers, 27 Greenshank, 11+ Kentish Plovers, 2 Caspian Tern, 1 Lesser Sandplover and 10 Whimbrel. In the bushes were 1 female Japanese Reed Bunting, 1 male Amur Falcon, 1 Black browed Reed Warbler, 1 Japanese Grosbeak, 1 Brown Shrike, 1 Black faced Bunting and a female Siberian Rubythroat.
Above -Siberian Rubythroat female.
As if that wasn't enough we wandered over to some partly filled in pools and found 15 Wood Sands, 4 Black winged Stilts, 5 Marsh Sands, 6 Long toed Stints, 3 Great Egrets, 1 Chinese Pond Heron and 1 Night Heron.
Above - Long toed Stint
Not a bad first full day in China!.
