David

Brent geese spend the summer, their breeding season, in Siberia. Come winter, they head for places with a milder climate. Large numbers end in the Exe estuary. By the new year they have finished off their preferred food: eel grass. They switch to the grasses of the Exminster marshes, crowding there at high tide and gathering in numbers on sandbanks exposed by the ebbing tide.

I noticed this distinctive boat on occasional visits to the hide at Dawlish Warren over they years, and vaguely wondered what it was for. A different viewpoint – from the water, on one of the birdwatching cruises on the Stuart Line boat – finally provided the answer. Fishing for mussels. It’s a floating vacuum cleaner.

A merganser drake swimming in the Exe estuary off Dawlish Warren. Now you see him, now you don’t – he’s dived after a fish.

Starlings gathering on the mast of one of the yachts laid up for the winter in a riverside boatyard at Topsham.

Snowdrops flowering a month or so ago in the mild south Devon climate of Topsham.

Views of the landscape looking across the Exe estuary from the high vantage point of the churchyard at Topsham. The reed beds on the far bank of the river extend upstream under the M5 bridge and through a series of RSPB reserves nearing the centre of Exeter.