As you can tell, Ogmore-by-sea is swiftly becoming a trend this winter for me. That coastline is something special and just 30 minutes down the motorway in good traffic. I hoped to catch up with the Purple Sandpipers again but I only located one. Turns out there were quite a number of Fisherman setup along the coastline so I wonder if they had flown further up the coast to avoid so much human activity. Upon reaching the setup of Fisherman, I scanned the rocks to see if there were any birds amongst them, which didn’t go down well apparently as staring back at me once I put the bins down was a stern middle finger from a young Fisherman.. How polite..

The morning picked up however after stumbling across a mystery fossil. I’m not up on my fossils to be honest so I had to get help with this one and it turned out to be a 350 Million year old Rugose Coral! Big thanks to Chris Partridge for finding this link . I had no idea they were there, so it was a discovery for myself.

‘Fossilised colony of the rugose coral Solenodendron horsfieldi on a beach near Ogmore-by-Sea in Wales. This coral is in carbonate rocks of the Gully Oolite Formation, which is of early Carboniferous (Mississippian) age, about 350 million years old.’

I also found quite a few Mermaids Purses which seem standard on every beach tour these days but I believe these to be Lesser-spotted Dogfish Egg Sacks. Other than that, fairly quiet with two Med Gulls and the usual Turnstones.