The Lincolnshire Coast...

A trip out today to the Linc's coast primarily to look for the reported Shorelarks at Brickyard Lane resulted in us having an excellent day's birding,this is how the day unfolded.
On our way to the coast we saw a single Barn Owl hunting over fields at the entrance to North Somercotes village,a nice start.On arrival at Rimac,we made our way south towards Brickyard Lane,walking through the exstensive dune system,with the best bird being a Little Owl watched sat on the side of a ruined building at the Churchill road entrance to the NNR.It gave nice views through the scope,a cracking little bird.As we got to the Brickyard lane area,we immediately located a large mixed flock of Snow Bunting and Twite feeding out on the developing foreshore giving great views of these winter visitors to our coastline.After about 20 minutes of searching we managed to locate the Shorelarks at long range making our way towards them,but the birds decided they didn't want any company and promptly flew out towards the sea,to a distant shingle ridge,so we followed.When we reached the area we thought they had flown to,they where nowhere to be seen and we looked back towards the original area we had seen them and noticed a guy looking through his scope intently at something,so we headed back,sure enough when we reached the area he was stood in,we noticed he was watching 2 Shorelark.We then were treated to fantastic close views of the birds until a pig ignorant photographer flushed them,they then flew out over the beach and where joined by the other 2 birds which had obviously been hiding somewhere!.After enjoying the larks we headed back north along the beach and had a look on the sea,seeing very little apart for a few Red-throated Diver,an impressive 145 Carrion Crow and a total of 397 Pink-footed Geese passing south.As we approached the developing shingle ridge out from the Rimac car park we flushed a large number of Skylark with at least 8 Lapland Bunting and 56 Twite,the Twite showing particularly well and we managed to locate a single colour-ringed bird which had orange over white on its left leg.Other birds observed in this general area included a single adult female Marsh Harrier which flew south,a single late juvenile Swallow south,my latest record for some years and a pair of Stonechat,just out from the car park here.After all this effort we had quite an impressive list of birds and we travelled home stopping briefly at Thoresby bridge to look for some reported Whooper Swans,but we only managed to find a single bird along with 27 of their commoner cousins and also enjoyed a hunting Short-eared Owl nearby,a great end to a cracking day!.