My regular meeting with Ken from Essex for a day's birding brought him south to Kent this month, and as a keen photographer, it seemed sensible to aim for Oare where you can always get relatively close to the birds and if you time the tide and the sunlight right it should be possible to get some great shots. Remember I'm talking about Ken here - my efforts are always a might amateur!
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| Golden Plover |
With high tide on our arrival, we decided to concentrate on the pool first and catch the waders whilst they were still on the pool. We were immediately rewarded with huge numbers of golden plover, most still with their summer plumage. Dotted amongst them were dunlin, grey plover and some ringed plover. The most numerous species was black-tailed godwit but as we moved along the reserve we noticed more ruff too. A large group of avocet were taking up the centre of the pool, and lapwing and starling seemed to hold most of the land-based territory.
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| Young Sedge Warbler |
Before we reached the creek we found a family of sedge warblers in the bushes, with at least three juveniles, all making contact calls with their parents far less visible. Young dunnock, a linnet family and little grebe added to our list as we moved onto the sea wall to scan through the huge mixed flock of waders. Here, knot and little ringed plover were feeding, yellow wagtail flew between the creek side and the pool and house martin and swallow were taking advantage of the bugs over the water.
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| Redshank feeding |
After an early lunch we decided to move on to Conyer creek, and although the tide by now was extremely low we found huge numbers of redshank, more black-headed gull, oystercatcher and lapwing on the marshy islands in the creek. More house martin were feeding low over land and their noises were a delight to hear.
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