Back at Keyhaven bird reserve

The train journey to Bournemouth to see my friend P is almost 3 hours each way.  But it’s very easy to sit and look at the changing countryside, as you go along.  And the 4 trains were all on time and perfectly lovely in every way. 
Then  P picks me up from the station and we drive to Keyhaven. She has a little Fiat 500, with a retractable roof, so I feel rather stylish as we whizz along the coast in an eastern direction. 
I really can’t do this place justice with a phone camera, it’s really wonderful. My main blip shows the pathway we were walking along, plus a little egret, of whom we saw many. We saw many waders, ducks and geese today, but there were two highlights.  One was the terns fishing - graceful little white birds, they look like swifts, with scimitar wings, when they’re flying; they looks like kestrels when hovering over the water; and then like gannets when the zoom vertically down at great speed to grab the fish they’ve seen. 
The other exceptional sight, which we watched for ages while eating our packed lunch, was a small shallow island with avocets nesting all over, on the ground.  There was a couple of yards all around between each of them, so carefully spaced.  Assuming ( which might be completely wrong) that the females are sitting on the eggs, the others are off getting food.  But 3 or 4 males remain, keeping guard. We watched two mallards - just bumbling around, with no malign intention I’m sure, being driven off the island by two furious avocets who were jumping up and down, squawking, and lunging forward with their beaks. The ducks waddled away, clearly feeling it wasn’t a pleasant place to be. I daresay there are worse foe to be dealt with during the time that the eggs are incubating.  
Avocets were extinct in the UK from the end of the 19th century until the 2nd world war.  The cause being the drain of marshland for agriculture, and egg collectors ( why on earth would anyone do that?). They’re now doing very well in safe environments Iike this, and others, mainly on the east coast. (The island shown in the extra)