Multitude of mackerel and their prey come inshore

A DRIFT of sand eels lay across the beach, a silver slick like spilt mercury, or shards of a shattered mirror shining in the early-morning sun.

It’s hard to think of a word other than ‘drift’ to describe their displacement, spread as if carried onto the beach by a wave and then dropped — left stranded. The sand must have been too hard for them to burrow into, otherwise they would have disappeared.

Sand eels have the uncanny ability to submerge themselves in wet sand and burrow through it at speed. Burrowing is usually the prerogative of worms (and, indeed, there are numerous species of burrowing marine worms under our mud flats and beaches) but sand eels are definitely fish, quite pretty fish, full of nutritious oils — which makes them a favoured prey species for almost any larger fish that encounter them.