Oare again

For every one wader at Rainham, Oare Marshes has about 250, possibly more. It's a great spot, with a healthy scrape just next to the estuary, a convenient place to come and sit out the high tide. If you time your visits right, you'll get waders flying in (or out) pretty much constantly, and some relatively close feeding action - the single lane road runs right alongside, so you can get pretty good views, and unlike Minsmere, which was utterly dead on Sunday, there will always be something of interest on the pools. Demonstrating this very neatly, the first Wader I saw was a Wood Sandpiper, before I'd even stopped the car. Black-tailed Godwits everywhere, Ringed Plover, and lots of Redshank too - a raucous affair. No biggie though - easily the best wader I've here was a Sharp-tailed Sandpiper about four or five years ago, it has the distinction of being the first bird I ever twitched. I had no idea which one it was of course, but plenty of people (and I mean plenty) were on hand to point my telescope in the right direction. Oh the retrospective embarrassment..... I also tried to twitch a Tufted Puffin here, the though the less said about that the better - a large and chaotic DIP, though I would at least have been able to identify it myself this time. Unless a regular Puffin had been there.....