Where to see redshank in the UK

How to find redshank

Redshank runs two opposite calendars, and which one you should plan around depends on the site rather than the month or the county. Devon's records here — 2,488 of them, gathered around Bowling Green Marsh beside the Exe — put 425 in January and 28 in May. Oxfordshire's 1,566, around Otmoor, put 465 in May and six in January. Same bird, same directory, opposite years, so the best odds of seeing a redshank belong to whichever half of that split you are nearer. The national line, which is most recorded in March at 11.2% of 19,919 records and least in June at 4.8%, is an average of two populations doing the reverse of each other, and it describes hardly any of the twelve counties it is made from.

The split is clean enough to act on without knowing anything else. Four counties are at their busiest in April or May: Oxfordshire, Northamptonshire, Worcestershire and Staffordshire. All four are inland, and the site behind each is wet grassland or a flooded gravel working where redshank breed — Otmoor, Summer Leys, Upton Warren, Doxey Marshes. Seven of the remaining eight are busiest between September and January, and every one of those seven sits on an estuary or the open coast. Conwy is the exception that has to be named rather than smoothed away: its peak is April and its emptiest month is May, which is a curve to read on its own page.

Records measure detection rather than abundance, and that caveat lands hardest on the inland spring figures. A breeding redshank spends April standing on a fence post shouting; the same bird in October is one small grey-brown wader among hundreds on a mudflat. Part of Otmoor's May is the bird being obvious rather than the bird being present. The coastal counties have no such excuse and the winter numbers behind them are large — Flintshire alone holds 5,327 records, better than a quarter of the national total, spread so evenly that its weakest month still takes 4.4%.

Why it happens is well established and none of it comes from these records. British redshank nest on wet meadows, saltmarsh and damp rough ground from April onwards, and the estuary flocks that build from late summer are swollen by birds arriving from Iceland. Inland breeding sites empty in July once the young are flying. Six January records at Otmoor is therefore not a hole in the data. It is a reserve with no redshank on it.

The awkward part of this bird is what it does to the rest of the marsh. Redshank decides you are a threat before anything else has looked up, and it says so — a loud, insistent yelping delivered as it goes, which lifts every wader in earshot. The old name for it is the warden of the marshes and it was not meant kindly. Anyone edging along a creek towards something scarcer will lose the argument, so use the alarm as information: it generally goes off a few seconds before you learn what else was standing there.

The legs do most of the identification and they are less useful than the name promises. An adult's are orange-red, the flat orange of cheap plastic rather than anything subtle, while a juvenile in its first autumn has legs of a dull yellowish orange, which is where most September confusion begins. The mark that never fails is in flight: a broad white trailing edge running along the back of the wing, and a white wedge up the lower back, both visible at any range and shared by nothing else ordinary on a British estuary. Spotted redshank is longer-billed, greyer and darker-legged. Greenshank is bigger and paler with legs the colour of a wet pebble.

So decide which redshank you want before you pick a date. For the display, take an inland reserve in the second half of April and get there early: the song-flight is a slow yodelling delivered on stiff, shallow, quivering wingbeats above the same field, and you will hear it well before you see the bird making it. Otmoor and Summer Leys are the straightforward options. Staffordshire concentrates harder than any county here — 39.0% of its records fall in April — but that is 39.0% of only 136 records, and the two hides at Doxey Marshes are locked, with the access code coming from a phone call to The Wolseley Centre beforehand.

The estuary half has an access catch of its own, and it applies to the best of the lot. The largest set of redshank records on this site surrounds Connah's Quay on the Welsh shore of the Dee, a reserve run by the Deeside Naturalists' Society whose access is restricted and arranged through the society rather than open to anyone who drives up. Check before you travel. Hayle Estuary in Cornwall is the opposite proposition — open at all times, a hide twenty metres from the car park, and a county whose records are most recorded in October at 19.7% of 2,262.