After visiting Titchwell on New Year’s Eve we dropped into Holkham and visited ‘Holkham Gap’ in search of a flock of Shore Larks. Shore Larks are very rare visitors to Britain – they breed in mountains in Europe and in the far north on tundra on open ground but a few birds get to Britain and winter on the East coast – Holkham Gap is a favourite spot for them.
Holkham Gap is an amazing and huge area of salt marsh and sand dunes. Here it is at low tide – when the tide comes in it reaches the place where the people are walking. This picture doesn’t give a good impression of the size of the place – when the tide is out it is thousands of acres in extent and the distance from low water to high water is approaching a mile!
Across the salt marsh – a favourite place for birds to feed on the salt marsh plant seeds
When we arrived the sun was beginning to set
We quickly (and perhaps unexpectedly) found the flock of shore larks on the edge of the dunes – there were around 30 birds and they were quite flighty – I managed to snap a few pictures but it was rather dark and as a result the quality of the pictures is rather poor. However you can see the yellow and black face.
Here is a much better picture of a shore lark photographed at Blyth Harbour, Northumberland – via Wikimedia Commons (not one of my photos)
By MPF [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0
A very smart and distinctive bird – always a pleasure to see shore larks in Britain – a bird from a very remote part of the world visiting one of England’s few remaining huge, wild and beautiful places