Dawn Chorus of Wings – Snettisham’s Wader Spectacular

 

The wader flock -Black Tailed Godwits, Knots, Dunlins - and a surprise Spoonbills began to fly into roost in waves.

There are moments in a birdwatcher’s life when sleep is not an option, when the alarm shrieks at an ungodly hour, and instead of throwing it at the wall, you leap up with the eagerness of a child on Christmas morning. That was me at 3.45 am in Norfolk. I’d found accommodation just fifteen minutes from RSPB Snettisham – conveniently close, yet still requiring that bleary-eyed shuffle to the car, carrying all my camera kit and vitals for the day ahead.

By 4.30 am, I was parked and walking out towards the hides, the salt air already tinged with excitement. There’s a sense of pilgrimage about this place during spring tides. You join a silent procession of head-torch beams bobbing along the paths, all of us converging on the same sacred ground: the lagoons and mudflats where one of Britain’s greatest wildlife spectacles was about to unfold.

Initially, I thought the band of silvery white and black that stretched across the tideline was a sand bank, but it was waders - thousands of them.

I arrived just before high tide. The Wash was swelling, pushing the waders in closer and closer until the air itself seemed alive with wingbeats. Then it happened. The horizon broke with the faintest orange glow, and with it came a sound I’ll never forget – a rolling, thunderous chorus of calls. Thousands upon thousands of Red Knot, Black-tailed Godwits, and Oystercatchers lifted into the sky in synchrony. The flock moved like smoke caught in the wind, turning from silver to black to fiery red as the dawn light caught them.

And then, the surprise guest stars. Over forty Spoonbills – yes, forty! – wheeled in like a squadron of eccentric avian aircraft. With their long bills swinging side to side, they looked faintly comical, yet in numbers they were magnificent. I’ve never seen so many together before. It felt like I’d stumbled onto a private party they’d forgotten to lock the gates for.

A flock of Spoonbills flies in at dawn.

The views at sunrise were incredible.

Eventually, the birds dropped to roost in front of the hides, cramming themselves shoulder to shoulder like commuters on a London Tube platform – only far more elegant. Watching them settle was mesmerising. Here was the sheer weight of migration, condensed into a living, breathing mass.

Why Snettisham, why now?

The Wash, Britain’s largest estuary, is a vital staging post for migrating waders. It hosts around half a million waterbirds every year. Red Knots are among the most famous of their tenants. These small, unassuming sandpipers are marathon runners of the bird world. Some travel from their breeding grounds in the high Arctic tundra all the way to West Africa – a commute that makes the M25 look positively trivial.

The wader flocks were pushed in by the cold waters of the Wash.

The Knots were packed together, fighting for a space.

A single Red Knot weighs about 150 grams – roughly the same as an apple – yet it can fly thousands of miles in one go. Scientists have found that knots can almost double their body weight before migration, bulking up like feathered athletes before they launch across oceans. The Wash provides them with the calorie-rich buffet of molluscs and worms needed to fuel these epic journeys.

It isn’t just the knots. The Wash is internationally recognised, protected under the Ramsar Convention and designated a Special Protection Area (SPA). Without it, countless waders would find their migratory circuits broken, with nowhere to refuel.

The murmurations of the wader flocks were jaw-dropping.

A spectacle etched in memory

As the sun finally cleared the horizon, painting the water in soft gold, the air seemed to still. The roar of wings had quieted. The birds preened, shuffled, and whispered to one another in their roost. I sat in the hide, my heart rate finally starting to slow down a little, and I was simply sitting, absorbing the scale of what I was witnessing.

Red Knots crammed together.

I have never seen so many Oystercatchers in my life.

An eye-level view of the wader roost.

Unforgettable is a word we birders sometimes overuse, but here it fits perfectly. To see the sky itself filled with life – tens of thousands of birds moving as one – is to feel part of something far older and grander than ourselves. It’s a reminder that migration has been happening for millennia, and still, if you’re willing to rise before dawn, you can stand on a Norfolk seawall and watch it unfold right before your eyes.

I took this photograph of the flock from quite a considerable distance away. The number of birds was unbelievable.