The Shore at the Doon

First full day in Scotland meant an inevitable trip to the beach known as "The Shore" to my fellow kids, and "The Doon" to my mother and her contemporaries. The best beach in the area, where children swam in rubber rings and played in rockpools before getting an ice cream from the van parked on the field behind the sand.

Sometime it was the place where a child would get their first wasp sting, or encounter a dreaded jellyfish, a lifeless disc of blubbering death threat lying there like a sneeze. One memorable winters day the sea froze in waves and I slipped on ice as usual, while getting a bit older meant evening barbecues there when we were on holiday.

Like the town, it hasn't changed. Only the ice cream van wasn't there, which was ironic as this October day had about the fiercest sun I've encountered all year. I got a slightly burnt face, but in the shade, it was chilly.

The sea was mirror blue and the calmest I've ever seen it. And when the tide had receded, quickly as it does in these shallow waters, the wreck of the Monreith, a two masted schooner that sank in 1900, jaggedly dominated the view.

As a child I tried to walk out to it, but ended up waist deep in mud, and alarmed at sharp sensations by my toes I turned back.

Today, as ever the rockpools were empty, but the sands were not. As the tides receded, the birds arrived, the first being a piping interloper exploring the seaweed covered rocks. "Cooooo-weeeeeeeeeeee" it called. My first curlew.

As more of the sands became exposed more piping birds arrived, the smart black and white oystercatchers with their piercing cries and brilliant red bills. How little I had noticed as a child, how I wish I could have noticed more.

Si

All text and images copyright CreamCrackeredNature 17.10.15

Beautiful still day

This red admiral...

...has a very unhealthy diet

Tide receding. I love these beach streams

Sisterly art

The wreck of the Monreith

Black headed gulls

Curlew in the seaweed

Gull watches wader

Another one further out

Comical looking oystercatchers

You often see them in that "beaks open" pose in photos

Feeding in unison

Trip to Holkham Beach!!!

THis is a new one for me; In fact I haven't been in Norfolk since a school trip to Hunstanton when I was 10  - three nights in Le Strange Hotel, rampaging around the beach and garden; finding a nest of baby Plovers on the beach as the parent did the wounded walk away from me...

Holkham is a bit further round from Hunstanton, and in fact the park up for food and Iain M. Banks reading pre walk session was at Burnham on Sea - where a narrow tide out creek provided peoplewatching amusement as yummy mummies carried babies in ridiculous pappooses; dogs gambolled in the shallows, and paddleboarders and canoeists tried to make headway in ankle deep water.

I got some provisions - multiple diet coke cans - and headed out on the path, this red ironstone path (if such a thing exists!) that I remember forming a layer at the cliffs at Hunstanton all those years ago. All seemed a bit drab at first; a few gulls, endless cormorants, some dull old coots on a pond, but soon I saw a V shaped flock of Geese overhead and as I learned later they weren't borinhg old Greylag or Canada-Drooping-Machines-Geese, but were Pink Footed Geese on the move to and from Wells.

Pausing at a corner on the path where the creek heads for the sea and a large area of Salt Marsh begin, I scanned the area with my 10x50s and saw a low lying group of little birdie heads in the mid length grasses behind a bored looking gull. Dark faces, specly bodies. I figured them for some sort of Plover, and a kindly typical old twitcher type I asked told me they were Golden Plovers just down from their breeding season in the hills. Big new spot for a rubbish birder like me!!! He got me excited with tales of a Marsh Harrier, but I never saw it.

A couple of Egrets were also doing their snow white work in the little ponds and creeks. Had a good look at the these most elegant of birds.

After what seemed like an age, walking along the track, wondering what these small flocks of birds were occasionally flitting across in front of me - I guessed almost certainly wrongly they were some kind of pipit - I got to the beach and wandered around, taking in the sight of an endless carpet of razer shells marking the High Water line, pink crab shells interspersed within.

No little terns nesting in the protected area and only a few gulls to see, and turned round for home. On the way back, found large flock of waders probing the mudflats. As I half guessed right at the time, another new spot for me - Redshank, with the fine black and white striping on their tails. Not Godwit, you fool! *punches self*

Back at the car park, more Vs of Pink Footed Geese came the other way - could see the pink feet in the binoculars - and eventually stopping off at Brancaster, spotted a Turnstone rapid dancing the creek edge. A skittery and very pretty little bird, that.