Country diary: The marshes are graced with a little catwalk glamour | Nigel Brown

A gentle autumn glow saturated the RSPB’s wetland reserve at Cors Ddyga, illuminating the rushes and reeds, and sparkling the pools that were excavated just a few weeks ago. Perhaps “scrapes” would be a better word to describe these slivers of liquid light, their margins still mottled dark with freshly turned mud and root, harbouring long-buried organic treasure, waiting to be snatched.

And daylight robbers there were aplenty – hundreds of them, picking, probing, sieving – gleaning soft bodied prizes from the shallows and soft turf. Teals zipped this way and that in frantic fashion, while redshanks demonstrated a pacy but ordered pick-and-go routine. Black-tailed godwits stalked, knee-deep in open water, whickering to one another as much as feasting.

Amid such busy, watery company there came two splendidly fashioned birds, a head-turning catwalk couple, their feathered dress an iridescent deep maroon, flecked through with tints of bronze, flashes of violet and speckles of emerald – glossy ibis indeed! And, if such plumage were not eye-catching enough, their sickle-shaped bills calmly and gracefully extracted the delicacies of the marshland: insects and their larvae, molluscs and worms.

“Glossies” are cutting a dash worldwide, their populations expanding in size and compass. In Europe, where only 30 years ago they were restricted to the Mediterranean basin, they have surged north and west, conquering France and the Low Countries, and now it seems it’s our turn.

From being a national rarity in the 1990s they have been sighted with increasing regularity, driven in part by climate change and our milder winters, culminating in their first successful breeding in the British Isles in 2022.

On 8 September this year a record influx of 605 individuals was recorded from southern Ireland to eastern England. It came on the back of large-scale movements of glossies up the Atlantic seaboard of Europe during late August.

Ynys Môn had hosted just six individuals before a flock of 12 arrived in September 2009. Since then, a further 21 birds have been recorded, mostly in autumn. As dusk descended, these two adventurers from the south took flight; by morning they were gone. Let these wetlands live and our lustrous visitors may one day return.

• Under the Changing Skies: The Best of the Guardian’s Country Diary, 2018-2024 is published by Guardian Faber; order at guardianbookshop.com and get a 15% discount