© Charles Fennell
It’s 6 am on a very cold October morning in North Norfolk and a hundred people are walking in single file along a narrow path between the beachfront holiday homes and a large pond. Some are experienced birders or photographers, carrying long lenses and expensive binoculars. Others are tourists enjoying a holiday before the winter. Volunteer wardens from the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds are on hand to steer people towards the best places when they finally arrive at the beach, and they are unusually excited.
This is Snettisham, a small village on the edge of The Wash, a vast flat estuary on the east coast of England made up of shifting sand and mud banks, where in 1216 King John lost England’s crown jewels when he and his knights were cut off by the tide and had to abandon their baggage.
© Charles Fennell
The estuary is now home to huge colonies of wading birds, such as the oystercatcher and the knot. At the very highest tides of the year, all of the banks on which they roost offshore are submerged. It’s the “Snettisham Spectacular”, when 50,000 or more circle above the sands as the tide covers them.
It’s a perfect location for wildlife photographers at any level of experience and with any sort of equipment. The kit lens that comes with the cheapest DSLR is enough to capture the shape of the birds in the air; a long lens can pick out individuals.
© Charles Fennell
At first, nothing happens. The sea is at least a mile away, and as the deep channels fill up , there is only a lone egret looking for something to eat. The people watching are starting to make conversation. Many of them have never seen oystercatchers before. Then the display starts, slowly at first, but then for fifteen or twenty minutes there is the unique sound of thousands of small birds flying together, creating a vast shifting airborne shape.
Then it’s over as quickly as it started: almost in unison the last few thousand fly over the heads of the spectators and disappear. It’s 9 am, the sun is up, and the spectators wander back to the carpark, knowing that they’ve seen something quite unique.
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Charles Fennell is a wildlife and landscape photographer in Yorkshire
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