WeBS; migrants

I spent a while today covering someone's Wetland Bird Survey count on Dawlish Warren - an hour-long snapshot of the waterbirds present on the site, my contribution to the network of surveyors looking at the Exe today, themselves a contribution to the national WeBS survey data collected each month for the British Trust for Ornithology, who use it in part to gauge trends in waterbird populations.

Being a sunny day and a mid-afternoon count in mid-March, I wasn't expecting a great deal out of the survey, and add to the mix the fact that today was Mothering Sunday - and you can see that there was plenty of potential for people to be out and about on the beach. Sure enough, when I arrived the beach was packed to the gills; a few hardy souls even in the water. The northerly wind was keeping the swell down to nothing though, so checking the sea was a cinch - and there were only just more birds than waves. A measly half-dozen Great Crested Grebes was it...

On down to the pond beside the visitor centre, where in addition to a fine drake Teal with three females, a Chiffchaff sang lustily from the high willows, whilst another called quietly in the willows just in front of me. Buoyed by this sign of a rapidly-turning season I headed on to the main wader roost. Nothing much along the seafront - two Knot roosting on a groyne the best of it - and plenty of people walking the beach even this far up. The tide was still some way off the bight, so after a rapid scan of the waders there I headed off to check the end of the sandspit.

Here was another sign of spring arriving: a fine male Wheatear flipped off ahead of me, from behind a mix of stone-grey, black and white, then a rich apricot-buff when he turned to check whether I was still walking his way. The point proved as enduringly birdless as the rest of the beach, and so I headed back towards the main roost along the riverside. An immediate reward came in the shape of a small flock of Sanderling, still in their silver-grey plumage and without any hint of the freckly ginger-rust they will develop soon for their summer plumage, who skimmed along the waterline and landed within a couple of metres of me. Heads bobbing with initial alarm, they soon settled down and began trotting along the water's edge, dipping erratically to grab small invertebrates as the waves washed across the sand.

Sanderling, trotting gently along the sands. Perhaps having wintered in South Africa, and on the way to the high Arctic to breed.

On to check the bight again, where the main wader roost usually occurs on the Warren. Not many birds, as most of them have headed off towards their breeding grounds - but there was a massed pack of Oystercatchers, all black backs spiked through with orange bills, a couple of Curlew sauntering impassively along the edge of the water in search of a tasty crab, and a fringe group of small waders - Knot and Dunlin - silver-grey, picking daintily into the shallow water for crustaceans and molluscs. Lurking on the fringes were a trio of Ringed Plover, all black bands laid across white and brown, a huddle of Turnstone on a fishing boat and a lingering group of Brent Geese - another of the species which has pretty much gone for the summer now.

Brent Geese - the last few lingering on the Exe will soon be heading off to the tundra of Arctic Russia, via the Waddensee - a massive area of intertidal mud between Germany and Denmark.

Most of the waders and almost all the wildfowl have now gone north, perhaps to Scotland and northern England or to staging posts on their way to the Arctic, but for a month or six weeks yet we'll see a gradual turnover of birds which wintered further south still: Ringed Plover, Turnstone and Sanderling, Bar-tailed Godwit and Whimbrel which have avoided our gloomy winter and lived it up on the sandy beaches of western and southern Africa.


True to spring weather form, the rain began as I headed back to the car, so only a cursory check for interesting plants on the way back - one day I will spend  little more time looking through the dune grassland to see what I can find lurking...

Friends at the weekend

I caught up with some old friends on Saturday. They probably don't recognise me, but that's fine. I don't really know them all that well either (though I'm learning more about them every time I see them!), but we've each been hanging round the Exe every winter since at least the early 1990s. They are, of course, Brent Geese - our standard Dark-bellied Brent (Branta bernicla bernicla). The Exe is actually designated as a Special Protection Area for its wintering bird population, in part for supporting an internationally important proportion of the world's Brent Goose population!

A small proportion of them bear coloured rings on their legs: I first consciously noted this back in the late 1990s or early 2000s and didn't think much of it, and to my shame, didn't follow them properly. Since then, weather, location and girlfriends permitting, I've tried to put in a few mornings each winter to look for marked geese on the river. Each of them has a single ring on each leg, which is usually marked with a letter, a number or a stripe or two - whilst some geese can wear neck-collars, Brent can't, as their neck markings are important social indicators: coloured collars would be likely to affect the behaviour and status of the bird carrying it.

I quickly discovered some constancy in their appearances: I've seen 'O-R2' - a bird with an orange ring with a single black band on the left, and a red ring with a white 2 on the right - most years since 2002, likewise ORR4. Interestingly, some of them seem to stick to particular parts of the estuary too: ORR4 and OYRH seem to prefer the Dawlish Warren and Starcross golf course area, whilst O-R2 and GFGX always seem to be at the northern end of the estuary, round Bowling Green Marsh and Powderham.

 

Typical 'scope view of the Brent at Starcross golf course - a bit gloomy, but nice clean conditions. Lovely short grass. This is the easiest place of all to see colour-marked Brent on the Exe...

 

Zoomed in a little, the old favourite ORR4 can just about be read, despite my grotty photo.

Eventually, I found out something about the origins of these birds. This was a bit of a mixed bag; slight disappointment as many of them were actually ringed on the Exe - so no mega-long-distance between ringing and resighting, but interest when I discovered that most were ringed as adult birds at a series of catches in 1996. This means that the older birds I see are now well in excess of 13 years old - that's no mean feat in itself... It's also just less than half of the current longevity record for a British-ringed Brent, which is a whopping 28 years, 2 months and 12 days between ringing and recovery!

A nice view, if not a nice photo, comparing an adult (centre, no pale fringes to the coverts - the back is a smooth charcoal grey) and bird of the year, with obvious pale fringes making a couple of whitish bars across the coverts. Notice also the lack of a neck collar on the young birds.

Saturday, at Powderham. Eye-candy in the middle, but no fewer than seven colour-ringed birds out of a flock of 250. The difficult thing is getting the numbers when they're faffing about behind the tussocks. A more challenging site...!

Over the years, I have also seen the odd bird which was ringed in Holland (like G1Y- and GRY9) and a couple that were ringed - excitingly - on their breeding grounds, in western Russia (like yellow JX and OKRD) - some 4,500km away from the Exe. So the birds which have survived so long, wintering on the Exe, are flying a corridor 4,500km long, twice every year. As well as all that incidental travel within their home and winter territories. I know it's not the same league as Arctic Tern and Manx Shearwater, but it's pretty good stuff nonetheless.

It's also fun to see that 'my' birds are often seen at other sites during their migration: the Waddensee between Holland, Germany and Denmark is the main place, but they also occasionally drop in further east in England.

They'll be off to Russia again soon. Hopefully they'll be back next winter!

In other news, a small group of us froze our butts off at Topsham Rec. on Saturday evening to do our annual gull count. Birds dropped in from an amazing height, presumably on the back of very clear skies and a tailwind, but numbers were not great. And boooooy was it cold work, standing around like that!