The strangest bird walk ever

Saturday 10am a guided walk with the London Natural History Society (ornithology branch) to East India Dock.

East India Dock, opposite the Dome, is the most unlikely birding patch you can imagine. Most of it is built up, with new Dockland style apartments going right down to the water, building sites all round and a bunch of derelict buildings and factories to the east. It is traversed by a couple of high level main highways and the DLR . To make up for all this concrete the planners have left a tiny scrap of old waste woodland - you can just see it in the picture on the edge of the river. Behind this the remains of the old East India Dock basin and behind that, if you walk under the main road and across a big roundabout, the River Lea makes one last great muddy S bend before joining the Thames. None of this is pretty, even the wild flower meadow they have planted near the basin looks more like a run down gravel carpark at this time of year.
The walk did not have an auspicious start. We met outside East India station in the shadow of the overhead motorway and the noise of the traffic and the building site nearby was so loud we could hardly hear each other speak and resorted to smiles and sign language to check that we all belonged together. It was easy to recognise the serious LNHS members - the heavyweight binoculars were rather a giveaway, along with the green camauflauge clothing - but the two girls in jeans and leathers and no binoculars were more of a puzzle. They turned out to be eco- tourists, students from Syracuse university doing a semester project on wildlife in the city, who had seen the trip on the internet and decided to tag along.
We started out by walking down through the housing complex to the Thames looking for gulls. There were plenty of Blackheads out on the water and a group of about 15 cormorants hanging about on the railings looking like something out of Jurassic Park. We spent about twenty minutes looking at the gulls and the cormorants (our leader G being the slow and thorough type!) and I was mentally calculating how soon I could politely call it a day when we got the first hint that this might not be all. 'Is that a goldfinch?' says someone. Goldfinch?? 'And that's a blue tit calling- '
Suddenly we're at a gate and looking into the miniature nature reserve. As we wait quietly birds start to appear from everywhere. In a scrap of land about the size of Gants Hill roundabout we notch up 20 species! There are goldfinches, chaffinches and greenfinches in the tops of the trees, dunnocks and robins and wrens in the undergrowth, blue tits, great tits, blackbirds... More bizarely there's a chiff chaff singing and a flock of linnets, and a meadow pipit flying overhead. (These are not your average inner city birds and the chiff chaff should be in Africa!)
We progress slowly but with increasing interest towards the dock basin, with our two eco tourists busily writing in their notebooks. G indicates in a kind of hushed David Attenbrough whisper that there are tufted ducks present! Since there are tufted ducks by the dozen in Valentines park I am not particularly impressed but then the same thing happens again. While we watch more birds start to come in: coots and moorhens are squabbling in the reeds, a little grebe is bobbing and diving amongst the ducks, a pair of beautiful shelduck and a whole flock of teal fly in and finally a kingfisher comes and perches on the dock wall. Across from us (just where the DLR goes by) we spot a pair of foxes dozing in the sunshine. This is getting crazy, you could birdwatch from the DLR - oh yes, says G, I do!
By now about 2 hours have gone by, G calls a formal end to the walk and the Syracuse students say goodbye and head back to the station and their more usual habitat. But the rest of us linger. With the civilians gone there is a definite change of mood: it's only 12 oclock, the day is bright and warm, the birds are out there - ! Unanimously we decide to press on up the Lea towards Canning Town.
There is a petrol station on the big roundabout with a cafe and toilets and we decide to refuel before trying to find the walkway along the Lea. From the cafe window we have a brilliant view of the Dome and one of our number remembers that there are peregrines roosting there regularly. So everyone gets out their binoculars there and then in the cafe! I get hysterics thinking about the poor motorists filling up outside finding themselves being watched through binoculars by an SAS style group in camaflouge gear - and we decide to move on. The cafe staff seem quite relieved to see us go.
The tide is coming in on the Lea. There are more teal feeding on the mudbanks and a pair of grey wagtails foraging at the tide line. All of a sudden we notice some paler birds standing at the edge. G gets out his telescope. They are redshank, about half a dozen of them, sitting under a concrete siding. We watch them in disbelief. These are wild marshland and estuary birds. What are they doing sitting under the DLR? G is writing down all our sightings in his notebook for the LNHS review and everyone's getting really excited - 6 redshank! On the Lea! wish we had a camera! Meanwhile I've turned the telescope on what looks like a lot of concrete lumps on the siding itself, just above the redshank. Um, G, I say, I think you'd better look at these...
Like one of those puzzle pictures which suddenly turns into something recognisable the concrete lumps have turned into sleeping redshanks, dozens of them. We finally count 60 redshank in total. We end up just standing there watching them as the tide comes in and the traffic roars above us on the motorway. Finally we say goodbye and go our different ways. The others are going on to the Bow ecology park but I'm done now, I don't think we're going to better 60 redshank and I want to finish on a high.
You know, I am used to birding in London. I am no longer amazed by woodpeckers in Valentines or cormorants on the Thames or peregrines screaming above the Tate. But to find on a birding walk in central London that the most numerous species we encounter is the redshank - that has to be worth a blog!


Our list:
robin 2, blue tit 5, great tit 3, wren 1, blackbird 2, dunnock 2, crow 10, magpie 3, woodpigeon 2, feral pigeon 10, blackheaded gull 20, moorhen 10, coot 3, mallard 15, mute swan 1
greenfinch 2, chaffinch 1, goldfinch 3, tufted duck 20, lesserblackbacked gull 1, cormorant 15
little grebe 1, grey wagtail 2, kingfisher 1
chiff chaff 1, meadow pipit 1, linnet 5, shelduck 2, teal 25 , redshank 60, foxes 2