On an improbably mild and sunny morning, beneath an ice-blue sky crossed by mares’ tail cirrus, my partner and I had the honour of joining Dr Stuart Brooker at Two Tree Island, Essex Wildlife Trust’s gem of a reserve near Leigh-on-Sea, on the county’s estuary coast.

We began by walking from the lower car park to the Eastern point of the island, taking in sunlit views down to Southend pier, counting brent geese and curlews on the saltmarsh and the mudflats still uncovered by the tide, avoiding the reflected glare of the winter sun with our telescopes. A distant kingfisher sat upon the prow of a derelict barge, and a charming robin perched on a bench, perhaps hoping for a spare crumb of picnic. We next headed to the viewing screens, and, at the second, had an unexpected encounter with a beautiful water rail, a small relative of the moorhen with a distinctive, pig-like call, its long red bill and striped flank picked out in the winter sunshine. We watched it for a few moments before this typically shy bird disappeared into the yellowed reeds. We followed the Borrowdyke pond up to the car park, and took a scan of the gulls there for oddities, though on the day of our count we found only herring and common gulls enjoying the asphalt and puddles.

We rounded the small slipway, and walked the start of the creek which separates Two Tree from Canvey Island, curlews calling eerily and wigeon whistling. We reached the new, architect-designed viewing screen, with its bee nesting tubes set into the frames of an old shipping container, and looked out over the lagoon, which was alive with wading birds, small and medium-sized. Flocks a few hundred strong of dunlin and knot found refuge from the high tide. Every so often these highly mobile flocks were spooked and put to flight by marauding, or perhaps just passing herring gull. In the sky, the flocks flickered grey to white as the birds changed direction, dropping down briefly on the other side of the sea wall before returning to their position. Beautiful indeed, the wheeling displays of these silvered spirits of the estuary, but deeply challenging to count. We arrived at estimates for the two species in the hundreds, and admired the beautiful, neatly marked ringed plovers which stood among the dunlin, and the silver diamond backs of grey plovers, mudflat wanderers temporarily confined by high water. Single greenshanks and turnstones, highly mobile passage migrants, and global wanderers, connected Essex to the wider world. Ducks including wigeon and smart, white and brown shelducks dabbled, dwarfing the numerous tiny teal which dined in the mud. 

We ended the day with muddy boots and a satisfactory inventory of the water birds of Two Tree Island, which will inform the Trust in maintaining the avian magic of this wonderfully windswept reserve.