Shorebirds

Seventy-five species, and they are the group that defeats people. Most of them are brown, most of them are small, most of them are only here in winter, and a great many of them are standing in a mixed flock on a mudflat several hundred metres away in flat light. Working out what you are looking at comes down to bill length and shape, leg colour, the way the bird feeds, and the pattern that shows only when it flies. This is the group I built the wader identification key for, and it is on this site under the field guide.

Photographically the discipline is the same one that governs ducks, only more so. Get low. A shorebird photographed from standing height is a small brown bird on a grey plane; the same bird from ground level sits in a wash of reflected colour with the water behind it going soft. On a tidal flat that usually means lying down and accepting what happens to your clothes, and it usually means arriving on a rising tide, which pushes the birds toward you instead of away.

The group also contains its own exceptions. The coursers and pratincoles in it are birds of dry open country that would not know what to do with a mudflat, and the thick-knees are largely nocturnal. The first shorebird on this page is one of those exceptions — a bird of dust and stubble, photographed nowhere near a shore.