Your average pigeon

Your average wood pigeon weighs over a pound and gets up very early. They may have "pigeon toes" but they goose-step about on your tin roof with their stubby legs so that you could be forgiven for thinking that there was a herd of goats up there.

Every morning this week we have been woken at first light by "Fatso"; a very large Norfolk pigeon with one eye and probably a wooden leg. I don't mind much, but what kind of person sneaks about at night to scatter bread on your caravan roof? I have my suspicions, and I'm not looking any further than this room.

Our caravan is owned by the British charity Mencap and is in Heacham on the North Norfolk Coast. It's perfectly fine. We stayed here last year and knew what to expect. Once we got in to the caravan (it took an hour to find a key for us) everything was as it should be, except that the electricity supply kept tripping out. (Having survived the 60s, I know the feeling.) A young electrician turned out at short notice and replaced the switches; after that we had no problems what-so-ever.

The coast here is actually The Wash. It's a big, shallow bowl of wet mud; so big that you can only see the other side by climbing a hill and so shallow that you can walk a long way out. The mud is great for long-legged birds such as oystercatchers, and the silty channels are perfect for shellfish. The top two things to do here are bird-watching and eating shellfish.

Over a week we explored the narrow, inland lanes that run along the ridge parallel to the shore, dropping down to the coast as the whim took us. Our primary route was National Cycle Route No.1 which is a tiny, straight, single-tracked, hedge-lined road that undulates through hamlets of red-roofed brick-and-flint cottages. We came across shining white fields of ox-eye daisies, cornfields edged with poppies and had to stop to avoid young partridges and hares in the road. The hedges were alive with small birds, especially whitethroats and yellowhammers. Through any gateway or gap in the hedge a vista of rolling fields or woods might open up, often with the sea beyond.

Gliding low over fields and hedges, harriers quartered the ground with their ample wings held in a V. Their long tails made them look more like kites than buzzards, which we also saw daily. Most of the harriers were Marsh Harriers, which are relatively common along the coast and even inland near our home in Cambridgeshire. The females are chocolate-brown all over but with a golden straw-coloured cap. The males are grey with black wing-tips and splodges of chocolate on the shoulders, making them look like someones unfinished sketch. Montague's Harriers are extremely rare in the UK. They are lighter than Marsh Harriers, both in build and in colour. We felt extremely lucky to see a grey and white male on several occasions, and a female once.

To do some proper bird-watching on foot, we paid a visit to Cley nature reserve. It is a great place to see gulls and terns and there are always bearded tits in the reeds. On the day of our visit, a bittern had been seen, two garganey ducks and two spoonbills. We saw none of these as Dan wasn't really in the mood for trailing round miles of boardwalk so that his parents could look at distant feathery specks. However, he was in the mood to sort through the millions of stones on the nearby beach (literally, beach-combing) and we spent a very pleasant afternoon on a quiet sweep of shingle that extended East as far as the eye could see, with hardly a soul in sight: A proper Norfolk afternoon.