Like a migrant I’ve been returning to the main scrape (marsh) at this Norfolk Wildlife Trust reserve for four decades. A moment in Bishop’s Hide, shared with two friends, looking north into an evening sky of glazed blue and sun dazzle, explains why.
The scene beyond the slatted window is, in one sense, typical. At this season, on this scrape, 20 different wader species are nothing exceptional. Then there is an array of egrets and gulls, terns or herons.
Tonight the miscellany includes a party of 80 ruffs, some still clinging to an extravagant summer dress from which their name derives. They may have originated from display grounds in Poland. Nearby is a solitary whimbrel and a trio of common sandpipers (all maybe Scottish-born). To either side are two still-immaculate spotted redshanks (Finnish perhaps?). Speckled on every shoreline of the pool is either a green or wood sandpiper puddling and stabbing in the silt. There could be 10 of each, all arriving from no nearer than Sweden.
Tonight is typical, but also an unrepeatable continent of birds. Tomorrow any, or all, could have gone; the cast will change even if the drama recurs.
Pride of place in the evening’s haul is a North American pectoral sandpiper, busy among the ruffs and an adjacent huddle of black-tailed godwits (almost certainly Icelandic). The “pec” is rarer fare and could well have been on the Hudson Bay in July; it would certainly have been on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.
I settle on it with the telescope as a kind of summation of the season, but I am troubled and foiled by fierce opposing sunlight. It thwarts me – until I see something more compelling in the foreground, rendered monochrome by glare, unnoticed for seeming empty.
It is the flat expanse of silt, silvered by a film of water, strewn with moulted feathers, pocked with wader foot- and probe-prints. It looks one part thick invertebrate soup, one part molten lava. If it started to bubble I would not be surprised. It looks fertile still, like summer’s full breast, but heavy-weighted with entropy, as if a whole year has stewed down to this gorgeous mud.
