Our first trip out in October was to the Lower Otter Estuary on a beautiful sunny morning enabling some lovely photos to be taken.

I decided to do the top marsh in a clockwise direction which would work well if we had time to spare to carry on on the old path to the beach (some hope with our members today who were feeling rather sociable or were they looking hard for the yellow browed warbler which had been spotted here in the last week).

We hadn’t been going long before Mike spotted a diminutive wren inspecting the leaf litter for insects. Then a bluetit calling from a high branch and a great tit in the bushes but what about the other side the path in the marsh. We spotted quite a few birds resting up on the various islands, as it was an out-going tide, such as three herons, teal, various little egrets dotted about and a group of four hunched up ‘egrets’ having 40 winks.

The creeks were still flowing with a couple of blacktail godwits feeding and a little grebe, sometimes known as a dab chick, performing quite close to us with a now you see me, now you don’t display and the ubiquitous mallards.

We now had been walking for sometime, always with an eye open for any incoming ‘notables’ but nothing new was spotted but wait, those group of four ‘egrets’ were waking up and do you know what, they had evolved into spoonbills. Oh dear, call ourselves birders.

We didn’t see the kingfisher which we heard was about or that little yellow browed warbler but with seeing the spoonbills and with a list of 25 I think it was quite a nice morning out.

And no, we didn’t have any spare time to go on the beach path as ‘The Bowd’ was calling back at Sidmouth with a waiting lunch for us.

Janet Fernley