White-winged black tern

The Rodwell Trail, Weymouth.  Photo: Bob Ford

With unexpected extra time on our hands here in Berkshire we spent Saturday morning gazing at kitchen units in B&Q and fridge freezers in Comet, but there's not much more we can do until we're actually in our new house. In the afternoon it poured - again - so I spent several hours trying to work out how to add a cookie notice to my website that would disappear when someone clicked the 'agree and accept cookies' button. (I got there in the end).

On Sunday afternoon, after drinks and nibbles in the church hall after the morning service to say goodbye to our church friends, I browsed 'the net' looking variously for furniture shops, concert venues and outdoor activities in the Weymouth area. Running near to our intended new home is the Rodwell Trail  a former railway line, which ran from Weymouth Station to Portland and carried both passengers and the famous Portland stone (download a PDF of the walk route here from Visit Weymouth). I came across another website about north half of the trail - www.dorsetwalks.com/rodwelltrail/ - that includes lists of the wildlife that can be found on the trail and, for true enthusiasts, how many have been seen this year and whether they are earlier or later than last year's sightings. Currently online is a video of a white-winged black tern. Now I'm no bird expert, so I have to admit I hadn't heard of this one before. Perhaps it's a rare visitor, or maybe it's an unusual colour variant of a black tern. So I looked up the RSPB's website and found that the black tern has a black head and body and, depending on the time of year, grey wings on top and grey or white wings below. So I'm none the wiser, really. But Ian and I do like watching wildlife for its own sake, even if we don't always know what we're looking at so, with up to 60 species of birds and a similar number of plants and even more butterflies (though maybe not this year) and insects to keep an eye out for, I can see the Rodwell Trail becoming a regular haunt.