My father-in-law used to come fishing here. It was only worthwhile, he says, when there was a good northeasterly. But then the trouble was that you had to stand on Blyth beach in a good northeasterly.
The wind is from the east today, but it’s brisk rather than wild. It’s late afternoon and the grey day is sinking into the sea. To the north, the neo-industrial Blyth headland leads the eye out to a line of churning offshore wind turbines. Behind us, stiff-grassed dunes screen off the A193. South is the old harbour village of Seaton Sluice, and the enticing lights of the King’s Arms.
The beaches up here have been scoured to their bones by the raking winds of a long winter. Around our feet my small son is hunting sea-glass – smoothed, dull jewels of sand making a long, slow way back to sand.
There’s a bird out there on the slow swell: a dark tick-mark, an Arabic character scratched on the wash. As I watch through my bins, it dives. It comes up again maybe five seconds later, and about 50 yards from where it was.
The tide turns it side-on and, for a moment, it’s neatly framed in my focus. A diver. Pared-back winter plumage in a slim fit; a dark, sweeping eye and an uptilted bill that means business. Sort of a souped-up grebe. I have no hope of telling which of our divers it is: great northern, red-throated or black-throated – they all look alike in their close-season monochrome. Off the top of my head I know that the red-throat is smaller than the others, but there’s nothing to scale it against out there. Down it goes again. Up it comes again, and again it’s some way off.
Eventually, between us, my father-in-law and I figure out that there is more than one diver out there. In fact there’s three, or possibly four. They’re diving in neat asynchronicity, with only one above the waterline at any given moment.
Back home, I look up the divers. Only the red-throat, I learn, has an uptilted bill. I put the bird book away and rinse out a jam jar for my son’s fragments of seaglass.
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