A few weeks ago in January 2013, my family and I went to Wembury Bay to have a play on the beach and in the many rock pools there. When we parked up overlooking the Bay we got out and walked to the path on the cliff edge and looked down and saw lots of birds sitting on the beach. The tide had only started going out an hour or so ago so the beach that they were sat on was clean and soft and damp and must have only appeared a short while ago.
From the top of the cliff we couldn’t make out what birds they were so I got my camera and my extra zoom lens and had a look. We also had our bird watching book in the car so after looking at them through my camera and looking through the book, we found that they were Oystercatchers! We hadn’t seen these birds before so we were very pleased to see them and couldn’t believe how many there were. There must have been at least 25+ of them!
I managed to take several photographs of them (which you can see below) and tried to go down to the Bay and sneak around the cliff later on in the morning to try and get a closer view and closer photographs, but they had disappeaered by then, which was quite a shame!
I had a look at some information about them afterwards and they were there eating the cockles from the many rock pools. Although I had been visiting the Bay for over 20 years, I had never seen them there before so perhaps I have just been very unlucky each time or they have only just started visiting the area.
A general description of them is that they are quite large and have an orange (sometime reddy) bill with their legs usually being the same colour. There body is black on top and white underneath and breed on almost all of the UK coastline, but especially where there are plenty or rock pools and so plenty of Cockles and Mussels to feed on.
Here are my photographs of the Oystercatchers at Wembury Bay.
Here is an image from the RSPB website of an Oystercatcher.
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