Friday, not a bad day, sunny but brisk wind once again.so wrapping up in layers we departed,heading for wonderful Walberswick, id never been there before so i was looking forward to our day out.Walberswick is just after Southwold and just before Dunwich(extortionate prices in shops but lovely places all the same)
What a pretty place, just what youd expect from a seaside village, the cottages were picture book pretty, some houses off the main street were a bit contemporary for my taste,we wound our way down to the car park near the beach, £3 for all day, Got kitted up for a long walk took all our food and drink with us, and prepared to brace ourselves for the wind whipping across the beach, but the first leg was sheltered , we headed towards Dunwich, our way was blocked after a little while by notices warning us of ground nesting birds and posts with electric fencing.So up onto the beach quite a lot of shingle and large stones bit tiring to walk on so being a keen beachcomber i suggested walking on the hard wet sand, not so tiring.Trouble is with me i go into beach mode and my eyes stay firmly on the sand incase something interesting catches my eye,such as Amber, or Sea glass,or pretty quartz stones, but not too much of that now, I am still on wader ID, off to the first pool, there we saw 6 Knot, one in summer plumage and the others were still in winter plumage, but looking very lovely all the same, we just caught a quick glimpse of a Grey Plover before it flew off, we carried on and walked down into the reed beds, we found a nice quiet corner out of the wind and had our picnic, then the plan was to carry on up to the woods where we could look down at the top of the hill over a scrape, the woods were sheltered and quiet with Bluebells everywhere, we passed by a lovely little cottage nestling in pretty gardens, an idyllic place to live, At the top of the hill we looked down over the marshes and the scrape (pond), there was a Wood Sandpiper in the distance, and quartering over the reeds was a beautiful Marsh Harrier, we watched it for a while, then realised to our horror that it was about to swoop onto baby ducks who were blissfully unaware of the threat overhead, it dived at a solitary baby duck, and luckily it missed,it flew back over the reeds, and the baby ducks just carried on swimming about on their own as if nothing happened.A Ruff joined the Wood Sandpiper, we had a tiny glimpse before they disappeared from view.
On our map was a tempting little pool amongst reeds, so we decided to go search for it, very difficult as we could barely see above the reeds, once we had gone back down from our woody hill, we had little glimpses of water and Gulls swooping and diving but there was no view point, then suddenly we heard a very strange noise ,it sounded like a baby or young child crying in the distance and as it came closer, it became a kind of mewing, then we realised it was the sound of Med Gulls, a truly weird noise, id never heard it before. Earlier along theses criss crossing paths we heard a Bittern booming, so we hoped we would get a glimps, a few minutes later we were not disappointed although it wass only a matter of seconds a Bittern flew up out of the reed bed and then dropped back in.Great stuff.By this time we were getting a bit weary, and decided to make our way back to the village(Walberswick), on the way coming across acouple of little pools where there was a glimpse of a spotted Redshank.We wandered through the village found a shop and got ice creams then went back to the car, our next litttle exploration would be a little way back up the road where we had seen a small layby beside some open access land where we were hoping to walk through and come out on the far side of the Blythe Estuary(lots of Waders hopefully) to be continued.
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