The eastern edge of England is one of the great birding coasts in Europe. Migrants coming off the North Sea in spring pile up on the first landfall they can find, and that landfall is Norfolk. If the wind is easterly and the weather is thick, the pine belts at Holkham can fill overnight with birds that were, twelve hours earlier, in Scandinavia.

That is why we chose it.

The three mornings that matter

On our Marshes, Meres & Migrants journey, three mornings are the reason the trip exists.

Snettisham, on a big spring tide. RSPB Snettisham on The Wash is timed to the morning high tide. We walk out to the Wader Watch about two hours before high water and stand there in the cold as the flood pushes vast flocks of Knot and Dunlin — sometimes 40,000, sometimes 80,000 — off the mudflats in one of Britain’s genuine wildlife spectacles. It is loud. It is close. It is the reason people become birders.

A reedbed at dawn, for Bittern. Bitterns boom. That is what the field guides tell you. What they can’t tell you is what it sounds like at three metres, before it is fully light, with mist coming off the water — a low, resonant three-note call that arrives in your chest before your ears. We choose the reedbed and the morning carefully for it, and we do it more than once on the trip.

A wood in Suffolk, for Nightingale. On three separate mornings we stand within metres of a singing Nightingale. That is not a promise; it is a statistical claim, based on what these particular woods have given us for years. The song is louder than you have been told to expect, and stranger, and worth the trip on its own.

And everything else

Around those three set pieces we have Avocet and Marsh Harrier at Titchwell, the Brecks for Golden Oriole and Nightjar and Stone-curlew, the Broads for Common Crane, and enough coastal walking to reset the year. The full day-by-day is on the journey page, including tide-timed notes and the hotels we’ve chosen.

When it happens

May 2028, with exact dates forthcoming. Register your interest and we will contact you when the trip is ready to book.

If East Anglia in May is something you have wanted to do — and if the sound of a booming Bittern at close range is what you are here for — this is the one.

We would love to have you along.