Between Christmas and New Year’s Eve we managed to find a window of opportunity between snow showers to nip down from Durham to the Norfolk coast, for what turned out to be a truly memorable visit. On Monday evening we arrived at Snettisham just as the sun set and the mist descended over the fields, then watched thousands of pink-footed geese passing high overhead as they flew out over the Wash.
The flypast lasted for over half an hour – one of the great bird-watching experiences in England – with skeins of geese passing across the face of the moon on a bitterly cold but windless evening. No photographs, but if you want to see what these fly-pasts look like take a look at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pt4XJIzmEsE&NR=1
On Tuesday we headed for RSPB Titchwell, where were saw ...
brent geese...
....pintails
.. and shoveller, seen below in more conventional views...
Then walked along Titchwell beach, crunching over tens of thousands of razor shells Ensis ensis, along with dead starfish, whelks, piddocks, gapers, sponges and assorted other shallow-water marine life that had been washed up on the beach. It’s not clear what had caused this mass die-off. There are reports of similar strandings of burrowing bivalve molluscs after storms that have shifted sand banks, but I wonder whether it was the result of a combination of a low tide and freezing temperatures that killed these intertidal animals. They certainly didn’t die of old age – there were young and old shells piled on top of one another.
Similar mass deaths of shallow-water marine life were reported during the famously hard winter of 1962-63, which makes me suspect that this might have been the cause on this occasion.
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