Nigel's Nature

 It was my first visit to this site for quite a while and well worth braving the bitterly cold breeze. The best bird appeared before I even reached the beach, perched on a fence-post along the entrance track. A female-type Merlin. I just had time to make out the brown upperparts and faint moustache before it took off, revealing a boldly barred tail and relatively short narrow wings. It shot low across the field causing panic among the grazing curlew and wigeon, even though they are much larger than the little falcon’s usual songbird prey. Maybe the raptor profile triggers an instinctive response regardless of size. The tide was not long past full, which explains the number of water-birds utilizing the adjacent pasture when I arrived. As water levels sank, waders began dropping in to feed on freshly exposed mud. Redshank were the most numerous with plenty of Curlew and Oystercatcher too. There were also a few Bar-tailed Godwits and some Dunlin. To the east where the shore is stoni...

 Sunny spells, light westerly, low tide 3.09pm Disturbance was the unwelcome theme of this visit. Upheavals to the beach were immediately obvious when I arrived. Judging by the wide deep tracks, someone had brought heavy machinery to take away a lot of the accumulated heaps of seaweed from the tideline. And in the process, they also uprooted pioneer plants, such as Sea Rocket and Common Orache that were beginning to colonize the sand, and disturbed the naturally stratified deposits beneath, doing untold damage to the whole foreshore ecosystem. While it may be laudable in principle to make use of fertilizer that is not derived from fossil fuels, any net gain is rather undermined if you trash the environment while you do it. To add insult to injury, some narrower tracks suggested that more joy-riding had also happened, although by motorbike this time instead of the 4x4 that is still stranded mid-channel like a metal hippo. Indeed the new tracks passed by that flooded wreck and cont...

 Sunny spells and showers, much cooler than recent days, medium north-westerly, low tide 16.56. On arrival at the beach mid-afternoon, I could see the amount of seaweed heaped on the foreshore had increased since last time and was attracting a variety of song-birds. Pied Wagtails and Meadow Pipits were not unexpected but a late Wheatear was a pleasant surprise, most of them having already departed for warmer climes. It seemed to associate loosely with the resident pair of Stonechats as they hunted insects along the edge of the dunes, whirring out from the marram to the nearest clumps of wrack. The Greenfinch flock that has been present since mid-August was still in evidence; I counted 26 of them today. With a dog-walker heading seaward, I went the other way to view the riverine muddy margins where apparently a Spotted Redshank had been seen recently. I failed to locate the spotshank, but was rewarded with a Grey Plover, the first I’ve seen here this autumn. Several Common Redsh...