What a wonderful place Snettisham is. Well, the reserve is a bit of a dump but the birds more than make up for this. We got there as dawn broke and the sky was a beautiful orange. The sky was covered with geese leaving their roosts and making their way to nearby fields to feed. No picture can ever do this justice but I tried anyway.
The RSPB have finally made an effort to make the mile walk from the car park to the reserve passable. This is important as the average bird watcher/photographer carries a huge amount of kit and walking along a rough path doesn't make things easy.
Once at the reserve there is not a great deal to see. It is made up of two elements. Two fresh water lagoons - these were old gravel quarries - and miles of mudflats that are covered by the Wash at High Tide. At very high spring tides the mudflats disappear under 7+ metres of water. This means the waders that feed on the mudflats have nowhere to go and so leave the sea and settle by the lagoons. The number of waders is countless and so they arrive in dense clouds of swirling bobbing bodies. How they avoid crashing into one another is unknown but they do. The sight of these cloud moving is stunning and the reason to come the reserve.
Around about an hour after high tide something makes the waders take off and return to the mudflats. You are the treated to one of the best wild life shows in the Britain as the sky becomes a constellation of birds rushing from the lagoons to return to the mudflats. The clouds again swirl and gyrate to form intricate shapes and patterns. To add to the show the plumage of the birds is highlighted by the sun to produce a mosaic of colours to go with the mystical geometric shapes. As if to accompany this display the flapping of the wings and the muted call of the birds makes a fantastic orchestral noise that enhances the pleasure. No one who has witnessed this can help but be dump struck by its brilliance.
This show only last for about ten minutes and the clouds of birds disappear across the sea. Occasional flurries of birds then sweep across the emerging mudflats but these do not compare with the performance you had just seen.
I hope the images I have captured do justice to this natural spectacle.
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