Free The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy by Michael McCarthy Page A

consisted of the intertidal zone, mudflats and sandbanks daily covered and uncovered by the tide. Initially I explored the saltmarsh edge, as that was nearer to where I lived, and I found lapwings and kestrels, skylarks and meadow pipits, herons and reed buntings; but I soon realised that there was even more happening at the estuary’s mouth, at West Kirby and Hoylake, where flocks of wild duck, and especially waders such as ringed plovers, redshanks, oystercatchers, and curlews, fed and roosted on the bare mud and sand, but were pushed off by each incoming tide and so were active and very visible.
    There were thousands of them: the Dee was overflowing with life. And the more I watched, the more I came to feel, as I still feel today, that the birds which live where the land meets thesea are among the most alluring of all God’s creatures. Waders is the English word, which describes their method of motion; Americans call them shorebirds , referring to their habitat. It is a useful term I will also sometimes use. Spindly-legged, nervy, refined, they epitomise elegance on the one hand, and on the other, wildness: they will not come to your garden, sit on your fence, hop on your lawn or sing for their supper; they remain in their own wild places, eternally untameable.
    Yet at the heart of their existence, and of our feelings towards them, is a paradox. They are the gift to us of mud. Mud we find repellent, a substance a step away from shit; but the inter-tidal ooze at the edge of the sea is the richest in invertebrates of all habitats, able to hold in a single square metre thousands of tiny molluscs, crustaceans, marine snails, and marine worms, and waders are linked to it inextricably, having evolved to feed on it, indeed, to divide it all between themselves. The term in ecology is ‘ niche partitioning ’: different shorebird species take different invertebrates from different places, and the main differentiation mechanism is bill length. Short-billed birds such as ringed plovers take organisms on the surface; medium-billed species such as redshanks start to probe into the mud for small gastropods; longer-billed oystercatchers probe deeper still, able to find cockles; and curlews with their decurved beaks, the longest of the lot, can find lugworms and ragworms at the bottom of their burrows. But all of them are united by a feat impossible for people: in moving over mud and slime and goo, they are never less than graceful.
    They have something else about them to attract free spirits: they are world-wanderers. Many species in shorebird families such as sandpipers and plovers are highly migratory, journeying every spring to the High Arctic. From around the globe – not only from Europe, but also from Asia, Australia, and the Americas – they head for the far north, to the tundra at the top of the world, which in its brief but bountiful summer, with insectsuperabundance, extended daylight in which to feed, and relatively few predators, is a superlative place to fledge their chicks. They then return to spend the winter in mid-latitudes such as Britain, or push further south into the tropics, even penetrating deep into the southern hemisphere; and on the Dee, the end of the summer brought to the tidal flats, the mud and the sand, a great influx from the north. I encountered for the first time Arctic-breeding birds in their winter plumage such as sanderlings, grey plovers, greenshanks, turnstones, curlew sandpipers, dunlin, and above all the knot, the medium-sized sandpipers which formed immense flocks of tens of thousands of individuals, so colossal that when I first saw them in a shape-shifting dark murmuration, far in the distance, I thought I was looking at a billowing cloud of smoke, and wondered how big the fire must be.
    But gradually I became aware of more than the birds. I started to become conscious of the place, of the estuary itself. You could not but be affected by it, if you spent time there. It was a realm apart.