Sanderlings

Just along the beach from the departing sandwich terns we saw on our walk yesterday we spotted a small group of these little birds. They're sanderling, one of our smallest waders, and they've been absent for the last few months as they breed in the Arctic and travel south to winter around our coasts.

As we walked we spotted a total of eighteen working the sands in front of a rapidly rising tide.  It's so good that, as the terns leave, these birds are arriving, some to spend the winter on local beaches while others pass through to winter further south.

They are the most frantically energetic of small waders, never still for a moment, picking at the seaweed or probing in the sand for food, chasing after each other as they work their way along the beach. Their busy-ness makes them one of my favourite shore birds.

Worryingly, at one point a group was feeding close to the corpse of a much larger diver which may have died of bird flu. We've recently been walking the beaches and finding not a single dead bird but we're now seeing more again.