Back in August 2022 I made a trip to one of my favourite locations in England; Shellness Beach on the Isle of Sheppey. One of the reasosn I love this place is that it is almost always empty of other people while the other is that it hosts large numbers of wading birds and gulls that are easy to watch at close range. One of the birds that is present in most months of the year is Ruddy Turnstone, a widely-distributed bird but one that is full of character and has an interesting life. In fact this has become one of my favourite birds and it always makes me smile wherever I see it in the world; a sort of link with home.
Watch my video introducing you to one of my favourite birds, Ruddy Turnstone - https://youtu.be/1ZDg24od0g4
My visit was on a lovely late summer day and I spent many hours on the beach just waiting and watching for birds to come close to me as the tide gradually came in. Although there were a wide variety of species, including Oystercatcher, Ringed Plover, Eurasian Curlew, Mediterranean Gull, Sandwich Tern, Black-tailed Godwit and Dunlin to mention a few, I decided to focus on Ruddy Turnstone with the idea of making a video about them in my mind. One of the reasons that I chose the Turnstones was that they are fairly easy to approach and, indeed, will walk quite close by if one just sits still on the beach.
As you can also see in the video, to get these photographs and video footage I also used some techniques to actively get close to Turnstones where I spotted them feeding on the beach, slowly crawling along on my belly, something that turned out to be far more tiring than I had imagined.