The first day of February is bright sunshine and the Nature Reserve and its visitor centre draws a crowd after a permanently miserable January. The rapid flow of incoming seawater in one of the main channels from the Rother attracts a patient little egret surrounded by a handful of less patient herring gulls that are both fishing and hoping to snatch the egret’s catch. The flooded pits at high tide are full of golden plovers and lapwings that bask in the sun until they lift in a mass panic as a peregrine flies low and fast straight at them from the west.

The many species of waterfowl on the water are pristine; drake teals display in a small throng, males spinning on a sixpence with a bobbing head and then a bit of a showy flap; others like shoveler, gadwall, mallard and shelduck are paired up and quietly feeding in the water.

A male shoveler swims over and his extraordinary sieve-like bill is clearly visible; it functions in a similar way to the baleen plates in certain whales, extracting zooplankton and seeds from the water. Wigeon graze the saltmarshes and grasslands in large flocks. Coots also graze together as a herd on their well tended lawns and then take a well-earned drink at the bar.