Walking the marsh loop at low tide
The marsh loop is only about three miles, but it's a different walk every time depending on the tide. At high water the path along the old dike feels like a causeway; at low tide the whole basin opens up into mud flats, channels and the smell of salt.
I started just after seven. The light was flat and grey, which made the egrets look almost luminous against the reeds. Halfway around, a great blue heron lifted off from a channel about twenty feet away, unhurried, and settled again a little further along, as if mildly annoyed.
The second heron I only noticed because it moved. They have a remarkable ability to stand still until you are nearly past them.
The mud itself was busy. Small groups of least sandpipers worked along the edges of the channels, running in quick bursts and stopping to probe, and a lone greater yellowlegs called its ringing three-note alarm every time I got within fifty yards. Out on the open flat a few hundred gulls were standing about in the way gulls do, all facing into the wind.
At low tide the marsh shows you its plumbing: every channel, every drain, every place the water will come back to.
The far end of the loop was muddier than I expected after last week's rain. Note to self: the boots are waterproof, the socks are not a substitute for gaiters. The section by the old pump house had flooded across the path, and I took the long way round on the grass bank rather than test the boots any further.
On the way back the tide had turned, and I could see it happening: thin sheets of water sliding up the channels, filling the low spots first, the sandpipers moving up the beach a few steps at a time ahead of it. In an hour the flats would be gone.
Back at the car by half past eight, coffee still warm in the flask. A good morning.