There is nothing worse than arriving at a birdwatching site which everyone tells you is heaving with birds yet not seeing a single bird, except for a herring gull and a starling! This can easily happen on the Dee Estuary if you do not get the timing of the tides right.

Below is a table of each area showing how good the birdwatching is at different states of the tide. Of course there are other variables including weather and time of year, and the table assumes the most important time for the estuarine birds, roughly August to March. In addition the table assumes what you are after are large numbers of estuarine birds. So this isn't a twitchers guide to rare migrants nor is it a guide to sea watching!