I keep a running log of what turns up on one stretch of the Lithuanian coast, with the wind and the water level written down beside it, so that a season can be compared with the seasons before it instead of with a feeling.

Ambershore is one person's notebook, kept from a flat in Klaipėda and carried out to whatever piece of the coast the wind makes sense of that week. The ground it covers is small: the lagoon shore south of the city, the cape at the narrow end of it, the flooded polders of the Nemunas delta, the beach at Melnragė, and the pine and sand of the spit across the ferry. I began writing the entries down properly in 2022, after a winter in which I could not remember whether the smew had arrived in December or January.

The name comes from what the storms leave behind. After a hard north-westerly the tideline here carries a thin scatter of amber among the weed, and the people walking the beach at first light are not all looking at the sea. I am usually the one with a telescope pointed at it. That is the whole legend of the site, and there is nothing behind it for sale.

What the entries try to be is honest rather than impressive. Counts are estimates and say so, birds I could not name stay unnamed, and the mornings when I saw almost nothing are written up too, because a run of empty mornings is information about the season. I do not give the location of any nest, I do not name the people I go out with, and I do not pretend that an amateur's notebook is a dataset. It is a record of what one pair of eyes managed on particular days.