An evening in Nel’s hide spent squinting at tiny birds at the edge of my scope’s usable range was much more pleasant than I just made it sound.

On entering the unoccupied hide I was greeted by a spectacle of large numbers of Black-tailed Godwits very close to the windows, with a brace of Little Egrets and another of Greater Black-backed Gulls looking on. Top predator of the day, however, turned out to be a fox splashing past a few yards from the hide with a bloody parcel presumably intended for cubs in her jaws.

The most notable birds were probably some unseasonal teal, two males and a female. A small flock of Dunlin were right at the back, and I tried to convince myself that some Little Stint were with them, before conluding that the birds in question were too long in the bill and probably a bit big. When they moved closer, I could see that the white-bellied birds in the group were clearly juvenile Dunlin, some with a couple of black spots on the undercarriage and some pristine. Returning home and consulting the book, I see that I should have been able to pick up a rufous colour on the head and breast (I coouldn’t) and that all of them should have had at least a few black spots on the belly (some didn’t). However, I remain confident.

Another attempt to convince myself of a max-range rarity was a female wagtail who I desperately wanted to be alba but couldn’t be sure. Her back was ash grey and unblotched, but in the end I decided that she was yarelli, partly on the basis of subsequent Internet research surfacing an identical bird in and ID paper. I’ll stick to ticking alba when I see a good flock during spring migration from now on, I think.