A Rock Pipit at Rainham Marshes

2nd December 2021

Time for an early winter visit to Rainham Marshes to see what was about. Most of the action on the reserve was from the Purfleet Hide where a good variety of birds were on display including Lapwings.

My favourite duck, the Pintail, was also on show and eventually a pair elected to abandon their afternoon snooze and swim in front of the hide allowing some much better shots to be taken. What splendid birds. There was only one Shelduck on the scrape and that was photo-bombed.......by a Pintail!!

Aren't Snipe amazing? When you arrive you can only see two birds asleep in view and then as time moves on, more and more appear from nowhere, not that I am grumbling. What incredible bills.

A dozen or more Curlews use the scrape as a roost at high tide and therefore tend their time just standing around or sleeping rather than feeding.

It would appear that the current challenge from the assembled photographers is to see who can get the best shot of a Curlew as they leave the roost to fly on to the newly exposed mud on the river. Here are my entries, although I think the jury is still out.

The river wall was very quiet with not a sign of the winter thrushes feeding on the Hawthorn berries as had been seen of late, with just a hardy magpie clinging on to its branch in the teeth of a cold northerly wind.

However, a male Stonechat brightened up the day although didn't stay for long. Don't you just love rose hips as a back-cloth for photographs?

But the star of the show today was the rather confiding Rock Pipit which was feeding on the tide wrack on the river wall, and allowed us to approach to within just 8 yards. A couple of months ago I was in Cornwall and found that the resident petrosus Rock Pipits were very tame and would walk towards you to within just a few yards. However in my experience the Scandinavian Rock Pipits littoralis found at Rainham are normally a lot more wary and difficult to approach.

This one was obviously the exception to the rule.