Timing is everything!

On the third day of my recent Weymouth holiday my 7:45am arrival at RSPB Lodmoor was perfect. I had just started to walk along the western footpath and stopped to scan the birds with my binoculars, when I noticed a very interesting new arrival feeding right in front of the viewing shelter.

I can walk very fast when I have to and my stumpy legs really got cracking that morning. In the blink of an eye (slight exaggeration!) I had walked around to the shelter, and was watching this Spoonbill (Platalea leucorodia) as it swept its wide flat bill back and forth through the water, scooping up and swallowing the small creatures it was catching.

I had only ever seen Spoonbills at some distance before so I was delighted to spend time watching this bird, a juvenile according to other local birders who also managed to see it a little later in the day.

According to an article on the RSPB website, Spoonbills were once a familiar sight in Britain, until ‘drainage of wetland habitats and hunting resulted in a population crash’. They were last recorded nesting in Suffolk in 1668 and were not known to have bred again until the late 1990s, over 300 years later. Now, they breed regularly at Holkham National Nature Reserve in Norfolk, and at RSPB Fairburn Ings in Yorkshire, as well as a very small number of other locations.