Life in the saline margin

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/sep/08/life-saline-margin

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The South Downs are hidden behind low cloud as wind drives the rain across the harbour. Raindrops fall on the brambles all around me and run down the ripening blackberries and blue-grey juniper berries. I put my hood up, cover the telescope and sit on a bench overlooking the harbour, sheltering among the bushes, to wait for the tide to fall.

It is hard to imagine now, but the harbour at Pagham once bustled with boats – from Roman times to the 14th century – until storms engulfed the area in 1341. The inlets began silting up and the channels became too narrow and shallow.

The water slowly sinks to reveal a network of muddy branch streams, weaving between the intertidal saltmarsh vegetation that lives in this saline margin between the land and the sea. A group of tiny ringed plovers flies towards me, piping noisily. The rain subsides and I walk down to the gravel beach.

Chiffchaffs and willow warblers are chirping and whistling in the trees . A spotted flycatcher darts out from a branch and back in as I approach. A redstart perches on a branch. The assorted summer visitors are preparing to leave, after they’ve fed and rested.

Related: Across the ponds

I negotiate a slippery wet plank boardwalk and scrunch on the gravel to look across the water. Distant dots are collecting on the mud and beaches around the harbour. Through the telescope I pick out turnstones, common terns, sandwich terns, redshanks, grey plovers, whimbrels. As the sun comes out, a slim grey greenshank wakes from its slumber and starts to preen. It dips its bill in the water, shakes it briefly, then works it through the feathers on its flank, repeating the process, until it suddenly stops and flies away.

Swallows, house martins and sand martins swoop low in front of me to catch flies over the still water. I think back to watching sand martins arrive in the spring. It must be my anthropomorphising imagination, but this time they seem subdued, less vocal, more determined, as they flutter past and head out to sea.

• Forty Years on the Welsh Bird Islands, the 2015 memorial lecture in honour of the late Country diarist William Condry, will be given in Machynlleth on 3 October by Professor Tim Birkhead.