OK, let’s make the opening a bit more upbeat. The weather has been glorious, for 3 days. The White-winged Black Terns feeding over the salt ponds are nothing but stunning. As previously mentioned, it has felt frustrating, that we haven’t seen as many colourbanded individual Red Knots as we would like. But when compared to the two previous years when the team was the same as this year, Xiao Liu, Kath and Chris; the known individuals are actually very similar in relation to the number of Red Knots here. Or indeed we could say ‘better’. And we have 6 days of fieldwork to go.