I keep a dated record of what the Wadden Sea coast looks like on ordinary weekends, and I write the notes I wish I had been given before my first walk on a salt marsh.

I live in Amsterdam, in a flat where the only view of water is a canal that never changes height. Most Saturdays I take an early train north, then a bus that runs twice an hour along the dike, and I walk out onto the salt marsh with a notebook, a thermos and a tide table folded into my pocket. This site is the tidy version of that notebook: dates, weather, water levels, plants, birds, and the small mistakes I made getting there.

The notes concentrate on the Waddenzee shore between Noord-Holland and Friesland, and on the islands when I can afford the ferry and the time. I am not a biologist. I count badly, I misidentify waders in poor light, and I have twice turned back from a mudflat because I read the tide wrong. Where I am unsure, the entry says so. Where I have since learned better, I add a line at the bottom rather than quietly editing the original.

Nothing here is for sale and nothing is sponsored. I do not name guides, ferry operators, cafes or the people I meet on the dike, partly out of courtesy and partly because a salt marsh is not improved by traffic. If you want to see this coast, the national and provincial nature bodies publish access rules and closure dates for breeding season, and those should always outrank anything I have written on a Sunday evening.