Friday, December 31, 2021
We did our old lockdown walk from home on this mild and unusually still day. The tide had turned but was still very low - and from the river spit I could only just make out a small flock of ringed plover on the far side of the golf-course spit, on the edge of the loch. I could see something different (a dunlin? bit dark and dumpy, surely) among them, but it was only when I took a photo and zoomed in on it that I could see it was a purple sandpiper.
We walked quickly round to the golf-course (hoping the waders wouldn't, meanwhile, relocate to the river spit) and went out onto the exposed shingle - from where we could see that there were in fact two sandpipers. A flock of turnstone that we hadn't noticed took off and flew past us, uttering the chattering call that's almost a trill - and another, flutier note. They flew low across the river and went down among the sea-weedy boulders where they were lost to sight.
A few minutes later, something made the plovers take off and they flew over to the part of the spit we were standing on. All the birds were difficult to see, but we could just about pick out the sandpipers. One had a longer bill than the other.
