Well, whatever the situation, field work is better than office work. But the truth is we are just starting to get a bit frustrated.
The first 3 days were great, but it has only got more difficult since then. Rain, and plenty of it, and mist, and thick bands of it have certainly made the scanning far from ideal. Scanners are like photographers and farmers; the light and weather are never right!The other issue is that the Red Knots are, so far, in very low numbers this year. Low numbers are not unprecedented, and any regular readers will know we often speculate on why the numbers fluctuate so much year on year. We joined the Beijing Normal University Luannan Coast coordinated count day on May 19 and at Nanpu there were only 7,620 Red Knot. On the same day last year, while not a count day we estimated 20,000.