Fragile Beauty

The delicate avocet is a now common sight on Britain’s coasts but it took an accident of wartime and a top secret mission to rescue this graceful bird from extinction.

- Mark Cocker

I can recall the moment I first saw an avocet. It was in 1976 at Minsmere in Suffolk, the flagship reserve of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. I was a schoolboy of 16 and it was that glorious hot summer when the sun seemed to shine every day without end. With two friends I walked to the coastal hide overlooking the reserve’s famous wetland scrape.

In the sweltering temperatures, the surface water and the first few inches of air above the sand-flats quivered in heat haze. About 50 avocets were scattered across the scrape and they were busy feeding or tending the curious pin-legged fur balls that are their chicks. It was the adults, however, that captivated me.

Their long lavender legs were rendered more insubstantial by the quaking air so it looked sometimes as if they were floating. The white of their bodies merged with the sun-flare bouncing off the shallows, and at times the creatures seemed more mirage than bird.

I studied in detail the intricate black patterns on the porcelain-white plumage and the black helmet clamped over the slender curve of the birds’ white necks. Then there was the ridiculous beak, needle fine, twisted upwards and swept back and forth relentlessly as the avocets fed. Everything about them seemed intensely fragile as if a good breeze might cause the whole flock to dematerialise like mist.

Today, I see avocets very differently. For one thing, they are widespread and much more common. They breed within half a mile of my house in the Norfolk Broads and just downstream from us a post-breeding flock at Breydon Estuary can reach 1,300 birds.