Number 412 · Field note

The heron at the sluice

A falling tide, the winter wader count, and eleven minutes of stillness on the tidal flats.

Mira Okafor · Sat 14 Nov 2026 · 5 min read

We started the count at half past five, with the tide already on its way out and the sky over the sea wall only just separating from the water. By six the flats below the sluice gate were open mud, silver where the light caught the runnels, and a single grey heron had taken the edge of the channel.

It is the same spot most mornings. The outflow from the sluice keeps a strip of water moving even at the bottom of the tide^{Note 1}, and the flounder that come in with it have nowhere much to go. The heron knows this better than we do.

The gate is opened on the ebb to drain the grazing marsh behind the wall, so the channel runs hardest just as the flats empty.

I had the scope on it for the curlew beyond, and kept coming back. It did not move. Not the head, not the neck, not the long patience of the legs. The curlew fed in a loose line along the creek edge, the redshank called whenever anything passed over, and the heron stood.

It stood so still for so long that the tide came back to meet it.

— Mira Okafor, wader count

Eleven minutes by the watch. Then one strike, so quick that the first thing I saw was the fish already crosswise in the bill, and the bird walking off up the channel as if nothing had happened.

The flats below the sluice gate at 06:10, from the sea wall. Print seed heron-at-the-sluice.

What the count found

Six sectors, two of us, three hours. The tidal flats carried most of the birds, as they do every November: 230 brent geese^{Note 2}, 48 redshank and the heron, which we logged as record number 412.

Dark-bellied brent, all of them. The flock lifted once when the tide turned and settled again on the far side of the channel.

Fourteen curlew on the saltings, thirty-six avocet in the pool behind the sea wall. We closed the count as the tide turned at the sluice, and the heron was back at its post before we had packed the scope away.