Kent Ornithological Society 
At the KOS we leave the decision on the venues for our birding to within 48 hours of our meeting so that we can have the most up-to-date news of interesting birds, weather and site conditions possible. However the dates that we go are set in stone, so we knew that sooner or later one of these days would fall on a significant storm and today was that day as we braved Storm Ciara.
I opted to meet up at Shellness, Sheppey at the rather later time of 10am. We had driven the Capel Fleet road earlier and seen very few birds and what we did see was mostly hunkered down.
We trudged out to the shelter on a rising tide standing on the leeward side watching waders such as Knot, Grey Plover, Bar-tailed Godwit and Dunlin come ever closer frantically feeding oblivious of the conditions. Several flocks of Brent Geese were checked and were all found to be Dark-bellied.
We struggled out to the point to see if any birds had be blown in onto the sand or shingle spit but the wind howled even stronger picking up sand, shells and small pebbles sending then flying into the air accompanied by torrential rain this made birding impossible.
We headed to Leysdown for lunch by the sea obviously in our vehicles, here we checked more geese and gulls finding 3 Lesser Black-backeds, when a large female Merlin was seen hurtling along the beach, this was followed by a male who caught some prey presumably a shorebird?
We wanted to check Chatham Dockyard to see if anything had been blown into the basins there, a Shag was our best find. At around 3:30pm we called it a day and headed home to Cliffe.
We had 43 Species, quite an achievement considering the weather.