About us

A Guiding Service Built on Twenty Years of Counts

The people who lead our tours are the same ones who carry out the monthly waterbird counts across this estuary for the national scheme. That work — standing in the same place at the same state of tide, month after month, in weather nobody would choose — is what produces the knowledge a guided morning depends on: where a species roosts at spring tides, which pan is drained in July, how a week of easterly wind changes what arrives, and which corner holds the rarity that turns up most years.

Access matters as much as knowledge. Large parts of the best habitat sit inside working salt pans, private marsh and a hunting reserve, none of it open to the public. Two decades of survey work, cooperation and careful behaviour have earned written permission to bring small groups into several of these areas at agreed times. We treat that access as fragile: numbers are capped, timings are respected to the minute, and any guest who cannot follow the rules is not brought back.

Beyond guiding we run the ringing station's autumn sessions, maintain two hides jointly with a local society, submit every record to the national database and publish an annual summary of what the estuary held. A fixed share of each booking funds hide repairs, telescope replacement for the volunteer counters and the fencing that keeps vehicles off the nesting beach.