Waves lapping on the shore were a soothing antidote to the maelstrom of Christmas shopping. In the urban sprawl over my shoulder lay queues, crowded and overheated stores and stop-start traffic; before me, open sea and sky, distant ships on the horizon, and a flock of wading birds on the water’s edge.
Approach any closer and they would surely take flight. Better to wait for the rising tide to push them towards me. No binoculars, but no matter; from my perch, on a rock under the low cliff below the coastal footpath, they were easily identified. Oystercatchers: dignified, immaculately turned-out butlers in pied plumage. Bar-tailed godwits: measured stride and elegantly upswept beak, conferring a snooty air, at odds with the surrounding pandemonium of sanderlings rushing into the backwash of every receding wave, chasing morsels disturbed by the tide.
Then, from a few feet away, clinking, rattling sounds: turnstones, flipping pebbles with their beaks, fossicking among strandline seaweeds for sand hoppers and seaweed fly maggots. Their cryptic brown and black mottled plumage so closely matched the hues of dried kelps and wracks that it took a few seconds to associate those sounds with the birds. When crows and gulls flew low over, they hunkered down amid the stones, merging perfectly with their surroundings.
A rock pipit followed them along the tideline, using its finely pointed bill with forensic accuracy to claim anything edible that the pebble-flippers overlooked. Turnstones may be masters of seashore camouflage, but these dun-coloured, speckle-breasted pipits are well-nigh invisible when feeding in sun-dried seaweeds.
The trappings of civilisation were just a short walk away but here was a wonderful sense of wildness, in this narrow intertidal refuge. Twice each day the gravitational pull of the moon supplies sustenance to this community of birds, each species equipped to exploit whatever providence delivers.
The incoming waves edged the waders ever closer. Engrossed, I too had been running on tidal time. I glanced at my watch. My parking ticket would expire soon. Reluctantly I rose, and so did the birds, in a clamour of piping calls and winnowing wings, skimming in a broad arc over the sea and settling back along the shore.
