Caspian Plover

We had been talking about a day trip across the channel and the Caspian Plover gave a good excuse. News of a Snowy Owl at Le Maisnil gave us an excuse to do a bit of exploring around Lille. You can look at it two ways, either a waste of time and putting seeing the bird you have gone to see in jeopardy OR as a chance to have a look at a different area,which may pay dividends later. I go with the latter. Tuesday was the only day this week but we were worried, rightly it turned out, about fog. We seem to be beset with fog during many of our trips, especially to Holland. The drive to Le Maisnil to was reasonably easy, and we managed to navigate to the village. We then drove round the surrounding lanes, stopping to scan across the fields, finding an inordinate number of white plastic bottles in all sorts of places, many pretending to be an owl.
We spent some time searching before heading off north for Ghent and the Ternhiuzen tunnel. The fog had lifted a bit so we were very hopeful. As we drove along the sea wall we found Vleitweg and could see a couple of people scoping from the the next road up. We drove round and chatted to them. The plover had been seen this morning but they hadn't seen it. We scanned along the furrows and moved along the road but only found some Golden Plover and some Hares. From a map of recent sightings it was clear that the plover really favoured the corner of the field near the sea wall so we decided to drive back down especially as we could see a chap parked there. As we were packing up our scopes he drove up and asked if we were looking for the plover, 'it's down there' he said, where I was parked. We thanked him and drove back down to park by the road and scan across the ploughed field. David found the plover and then several snipe. We watched it for a while as the fog rolled in thicker and thicker. One of the chaps from earlier turned up and we were able to get him on it before it melted into the fog. Another car pulled up and Helloes were said as it was a Dutch friend Pim Wolf. We chatted for a while, catching up before heading off for a quick visit to Brouwersdam.
Time was against us but we managed to squeeze in a visit to the harbour and back along the dyke where we saw several Mergansers, Goldeneyes, Scoter and 3 Purple Sands as well as 2 common and a grey seal before we had to head off for Calais and the 8 o'clock boat.
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