Curlew feeding at Arnside
Arnside
The curlew's foot stirs the mud and its bill probes for prey. Sunlight catches brilliant white feathers on its belly and the top of its thigh, and intricate patterning on head and mantle. Light shines directly onto the curlew whose reflection flickers in the water.
The coincidence of good light and fine feathers shows the bird resplendent in breeding plumage. The odd image with unconventional perspective helps identification since birds don't always present the classic pose. After a while the curlew has a meal and what looks like a lugworm dangles from its bill.
The curlew's foot stirs the mud and its bill probes for prey. Sunlight catches brilliant white feathers on its belly and the top of its thigh, and intricate patterning on head and mantle. Light shines directly onto the curlew whose reflection flickers in the water.
The coincidence of good light and fine feathers shows the bird resplendent in breeding plumage. The odd image with unconventional perspective helps identification since birds don't always present the classic pose. After a while the curlew has a meal and what looks like a lugworm dangles from its bill.
Jenny Brown's Point faces south so we're looking into the sun and birds are in silhouette. Heysham Power Station shows in the distance. Leighton Moss RSPB Nature Reserve lies directly across the estuary where salt marsh seques to quick-sands and mudflats. The OS map shows how water-channels of the River Kent hug the coast as far as Jenny Brown's Point where they merge with waters from Quicksand Pool Channel and debouch into Morecambe Bay. Twice daily tides bring organic matter and nutrients to provide a banquet for flocks of waders and water-birds. Fresh-water currents mingling with the ebb tide create mesmerising patterns. Low-water exposes deep mud-channels across the treacherous estuary.
The scene is dynamic as the ebb tide reveals fresh feeding-grounds and redshank scurry about the water's edge. A blustery wind ruffles feathers and wind-chill is significant. Birding is about what you see , what you infer, and what you detect later from studying images.
The scene is dynamic as the ebb tide reveals fresh feeding-grounds and redshank scurry about the water's edge. A blustery wind ruffles feathers and wind-chill is significant. Birding is about what you see , what you infer, and what you detect later from studying images.
The wind is raw, sunlight is at a premium. We fortify ourselves with hot chocolate and head back out to sit on a bench overlooking the water. Hooded, I couldn't hear curlew or redshank at the time but a video caught their calls through the wind. There's an element of retrospection about such a day. We watch the redshank flock scurrying close to the water's edge, note their feeding behaviour, but only the photographs give a glimpse of what they caught.
The RSPB digital magazine for February 2026 has an item: Mud Matters which gives insights into why coast and estuary is such a dynamic and important habitat.
The Arnside Tidal Bore is dramatic when an incoming tide surges up the estuary of the River Kent. We saw the speed and power of this once, down on the edge of the mudflats during a high spring tide. Too close!
'The Severn Estuary has a higher, more powerful tidal range than Morecambe Bay which has a large range but is smaller in amplitude than the Severn.' Both are spectacular.
The RSPB digital magazine for February 2026 has an item: Mud Matters which gives insights into why coast and estuary is such a dynamic and important habitat.
The Arnside Tidal Bore is dramatic when an incoming tide surges up the estuary of the River Kent. We saw the speed and power of this once, down on the edge of the mudflats during a high spring tide. Too close!
'The Severn Estuary has a higher, more powerful tidal range than Morecambe Bay which has a large range but is smaller in amplitude than the Severn.' Both are spectacular.
A flock of redshank, following the ebb-tide, came closest to the shore. There was a flock of oystercatcher, a flock of wigeon, and a small group of shelduck with the occasional curlew. There would have been other species too distant to make out.
In reading the RSPB Mud Matters it's striking how much is hidden from our eyes, below the surface of the water. Luckily, we like delving deep.
In reading the RSPB Mud Matters it's striking how much is hidden from our eyes, below the surface of the water. Luckily, we like delving deep.
Quicksands- living, liquid sands, saturated and quaking. Lively sands. Quick, or you'll sink and be sucked in.
Quicksands teem with life. A lugworm dangles from the bill of a curlew. A redshank grips a cockleshell. In the intertidal zones of coast and estuary- plaice and flatfish hunt the shallow waters, bivalve molluscs burrow in the mud. Lugworms, cockles and mussels. So much hidden life.
For people to care about the deep Oceans, or about mudflats we need to make the invisible visible. A quote from BBC Radio 4 Rare Earth and the Ocean Science Conference currently at Glasgow. I learn of EDNA: Environmental DNA. Fill a bottle with water from an estuary or ocean and analysis can now tell what life has passed through it.
Quicksands teem with life. A lugworm dangles from the bill of a curlew. A redshank grips a cockleshell. In the intertidal zones of coast and estuary- plaice and flatfish hunt the shallow waters, bivalve molluscs burrow in the mud. Lugworms, cockles and mussels. So much hidden life.
For people to care about the deep Oceans, or about mudflats we need to make the invisible visible. A quote from BBC Radio 4 Rare Earth and the Ocean Science Conference currently at Glasgow. I learn of EDNA: Environmental DNA. Fill a bottle with water from an estuary or ocean and analysis can now tell what life has passed through it.
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