Returning Purple Sandpiper

Taking TOIL from work on Wednesday afternoon 29th October, on yet another grey day, I arrived to see a group of 5 birding photographers surrounding a reasonably confiding Purple Sandpiper, my first returning bird of, dare I say it, the winter. It was perched up on the apex of one of the coastal defence rocks, it then flew even closer feeding along the edge of the inner ledge. The sea was very high and spilling over onto its eastern tip. It then flew to the rocks by the finger and then fed from along the other ledge just north of there around the rock, it frequently had to skip or even fly to escape the high tides coming in. I was disappointed to see again people standing far too close. Again no sense of fieldcraft and the bird's welfare not considered at all. Consequently and unsurprisingly the bird had gone to ground and I missed it. Little was moving out to sea.