Bognor birdmen have nothing on the godwit

I WOULD have been over the top of my waders. I'd thought of that when I saw the tide table. September equinox and the Harvest Moon draw the water right up above the strand line and you have to be prepared to get your bottom wet, so waders are useless.

You’d have to slop water round your legs all day. My mother taught me when I was a tiny boy how to be nimble on the saltings in September. She used to go shrimping and prawning with her father in the rock pools near Clovelly.

Then we moved to Norfolk and she and I used to go hunting for dabs in the wide sandy creek at Blakeney Point.

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We just wore sand shoes as they were called. Perhaps you might call them plimsolls. Today’s youth would not be seen dead in them, since designer trainers would be all the rage.

How much do they cost? Sand shoes were just a few bob, and when you come back to land again they were dry in minutes. No socks either: so they have to fit or you would get blisters.

Now, somewhere in Chichester Harbour, there is a large roost of godwits - see photo. They are the oddest looking of all the 25 species of wading birds seen on our Sussex shores.

They look so ungainly in flight. Long legs, long beak, the Bognor birdmen have nothing on the top-heavy, tail-heavy godwit.

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God knows how the godwit got its name but obviously he does know. But with its legs covered by the deep water in which it is designed to wade, the godwit looks OK, and even elegant.

I have to count all the waterfowl and wildfowl in a special part of the harbour once a month for the European waterfowl counts.

High tide is the time to do this, because all the birds have been pushed by the tide on to the dry land where they go to sleep until the tide drops and uncovers the muds again.

You have about an hour and a half to strike with your binoculars.

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But the godwits roost on out-of-the-way-fields and must not be disturbed. So a bit of creek crawling is called for. All right in normal tides but not the autumn moons. But the water was warm, and this one turned out to be an armpit job.

Two hundred black-tailed godwits were soon in the bag. Well, binoculars. Scruffy sandshoes, shorts and slop top are the uniform and never mind the looks.

Actually, some of the things you see on the Catwalk are no less eccentric as the top models slink up and down.

Mother in her youth would have been a sensation there in her high tidey gear.

Richard Williamson