03 Thursday Oct 2019
Tags
birding, birdwatching, British birds, RSPB Lodmoor, Ruff, satellite male Ruff, white-headed ruff
When we spotted this white-headed Ruff at RSPB Lodmoor, I couldn’t help but wonder if it was the same bird we’d seen at this same location on our 2018 trip to Portland. Of course, as the bird wasn’t ringed, there was no way to tell for sure but it certainly was a handsome bird, a ‘satellite’ male as I explained in last year’s post here.
02 Wednesday Oct 2019
For me, the Black-tailed godwits were a highlight of our walk around RSPB Lodmoor. They’re not uncommon birds but I don’t see them on my local patch and don’t often get close views of them.
There were several at Lodmoor but the little beauty shown below was feeding quite close to the western path. That feeding was a constant repetition of probing the mud to locate some choice morsel, raising its beak from the water and throwing back its head to gulp down said morsel, then plunging its head down into the water again. If its frequent gulps were any indication, the bird was finding plenty of food.
Black-tailed godwits are handsome waders that can be seen almost year round in Britain. Though local populations migrate to overwinter in Africa, birds from Iceland come to Britain to enjoy our relatively milder winter climate.
01 Tuesday Oct 2019
Tags
birding, birdwatching, British birds, Great white egret, Grey heron, Little egret, RSPB Lodmoor, RSPB Radipole
On the way to Portland last Friday our birding group stopped off at the RSPB’s Lodmoor Nature Reserve on the outskirts of Weymouth. It’s a wonderful environment for birds, with small lakes and large reedbeds, open saltmarshes and hedge-enclosed pathways, and it always turns up a good variety of birds.
Now, I’ve only been in Britain four years so I don’t remember the ‘old days’ when twitchers would race across the country to see a Little egret or a Great white egret, but even I can see how much these birds have increased in number in a very short time.
At Lodmoor, there were several Little egrets (above) – I didn’t count the ones I did see, and I’m sure there were several lurking amongst the reeds that I couldn’t see and, amazingly, there were six (!) Great white egrets (below), for a time all congregated in one spot. Now, that was a sight to see.
I was also impressed by the large numbers of Grey herons, especially those at nearby RSPB Radipole, all lined up along the edge of the reeds, sheltering from the strong westerly winds.
08 Thursday Nov 2018
The Ruff is another bird I had only seen at a distance, or through the ’scopes of generous birding friends, before our recent birding weekend on Portland, when we got good views of a single Ruff during our stopover at RSPB Lodmoor.
I have to say this was an odd-looking bird, with a head that seemed far too small for its body – especially on the white-headed winter-plumaged bird we saw – though it did have something of the look of an elegant dandy, with its snowy onesie topped by a splendid brown cape of wings.
The Ruff (Philomachus pugnax) is a particularly fascinating bird: in the breeding season the males, resplendent in long-feathered collars of red, black or white, perform dance-and-display competitions at specially chosen sites (known as leks) to attract females (known as reeves). And, even more fascinating, there are three different types of male – you can read more about that on the BTO website here. I assume, from its white head that the Lodmoor bird was a ‘satellite’ male but I may be wrong about that.
Ruffs can look quite hunched much of the time but will stand tall and alert when alarmed about something, as you can from the bird’s stance in the photo on the right above. I hasten to add that it wasn’t alarmed by the birders watching it but something – probably a bird of prey – had caused many of the nearby birds on the reserve to take flight, so the Ruff was keeping an eye on the skies. It also decided at this point that there was safety in numbers and sidled over to stand closer to the other waders nearby.
Ruff, on the left, with a Lesser yellowlegs and two Greenshanks
The Ruff used to breed quite extensively in Britain but now seldom does. We mostly see these birds as they migrate from their breeding grounds in Scandinavia to their wintering locations in Africa and vice versa, which is a great pity, as I’d certainly like to witness one of their leks some day.
06 Tuesday Nov 2018
Posted in birds, coastal fauna, nature
This is the Black-tailed godwit in its winter plumage, a delicate combination of white below and pale beige and grey above, with just a hint of pink from the soft autumn light.
The Black-tailed godwit used to be much more numerous in Britain, with a strong breeding population. But not any more. Now, although as many as 40,000 birds come from Iceland to over-winter on these isles, just 60 pairs breed here.
The Back from the Brink project is trying to change that terrifying statistic. By monitoring the nests of existing birds, by protecting them from predators through the installation of electric fences, by providing more areas where the birds can breed, by collecting eggs from at-risk nests and hand-rearing them, the project hopes to ensure Black-tailed godwits have a future in Britain.
The birds I saw recently at RSPB Lodmoor are almost certainly birds that have bred in Iceland but they all look the same. They are large wading birds, with long beaks they use to probe the mud for snails, worms and insects – the birds I was watching must’ve been hungry as I managed to take a lot of photos with their heads under water! Their scientific name, Limosa limosa, reflects their love of mud – limosa comes from the Latin limus, meaning mud, so these godwits are doubly muddy.
Interestingly, when researching this post I found out that the female Black-tailed godwits have longer beaks than the males, which means they don’t compete for food – a fascinating evolutionary adaption.
05 Monday Nov 2018
Tags
birding, birdwatching, British birds, green-legged bird, Greenshank, RSPB Lodmoor, Tringa nebularia, wading birds
As they breed in Scotland and mostly migrate to Africa for the winter (some birds do over-winter in coastal estuaries in Britain), I don’t get to see Greenshanks very often in my part of south Wales. So, it was particularly nice to get quite close, prolonged views of this pair at RSPB Lodmoor recently.
Tringa nebularia is the Greenshank’s scientific name, which Wikipedia explains as follows:
The genus name Tringa is … based on [the] Ancient Greek trungas, a thrush-sized, white-rumped, tail-bobbing wading bird mentioned by Aristotle. The specific nebularia is from [the] Latin nebula “mist” [which] … refers to the greenshank’s damp marshy habitat.
I’d like to think nebularia also refers to its winter appearance, a ghostly grey-and-white bird wading through mist-wreathed waterways on a chilly winter morning, uttering its short but evocative teu-teu-teu call, or, as Brett Westwood and Stephen Moss more elegantly write in their treasury of daily wildlife encounters, Wonderland:
… on a misty September morning, they have a pale luminosity, white beneath and lichen-grey above with a longish, slightly retroussé bill and greenish legs.
The greenish legs are, of course, the origin of its common name Greenshank and, though the colour is not always very apparent, you can see the obvious contrast between the Greenshanks’ legs and those of the Lesser yellowlegs in the photo below.
You can also get a good idea of the Greenshanks’ comparative size in this next photo, which shows, from left to right, a Ruff, the Lesser yellowlegs, two Greenshanks and a Dunlin.
04 Sunday Nov 2018
Tags
American bird, autumn migration, birding, birdwatching, Black-tailed godwit, British vagrant bird, Dunlin, Greenshank, Lesser yellowlegs, RSPB Lodmoor, Tringa flavipes
Its name says it all really – the Lesser yellowlegs (Tringa flavipes) is a slender wader, with long yellow legs, and the smudgy, less defined markings on the breast of this particular bird point to it being a juvenile.
The Lesser yellowlegs is native to the Americas, spending its summers breeding in the northern forests that lie between Alaska and Quebec and its winters on the United States’ Gulf coast and in parts of South America.
The birds we see here in Britain are vagrants, birds that have strayed or been blown off course during their migration. On average, about ten birds are seen in various parts of Britain each year and, amazingly, there was also a Lesser yellowlegs at RSPB Lodmoor when we visited during last year’s Portland trip
Two interesting facts about this bird from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology website:
Both the male and female Lesser Yellowlegs provide parental care to the young, but the female tends to leave the breeding area before the chicks can fly, thus leaving the male to defend the young until fledging.
and …
The oldest recorded Lesser Yellowlegs was at least 4 years, 11 months old when it was found in South Dakota in 1965. It had been banded in the Lesser Antilles in 1960.
Back here in Dorset, it was great to get such close views of the Lodmoor Lesser yellowlegs and particularly to see it in close company firstly with two Greenshanks and a Black-tailed godwit (photo above), and then with the same two Greenshanks and a Dunlin (below). This really helped to see the relative differences in size, shape and plumage.
Heck, I even managed to get a short video of the lovely little thing. Enjoy!
31 Wednesday Oct 2018
Tags
birding, birdwatching, Black-tailed godwit, British birds, Greenshank, Lapwing, Lesser yellowlegs, Little egret, Lodmoor, RSPB Lodmoor, Ruff, Snipe, Teal
Oh to have somewhere like RSPB Lodmoor as my local birding patch! Its 76 hectares of wetlands and grasslands, saltmarsh and reed beds are home to a huge variety of birds and often attract passing rarities, plus it’s a lovely place to walk and all within a mile of Weymouth town centre.
This was our second stop on the way to Portland last Friday. Our target bird was the Lesser yellowlegs – amazingly, a Lesser yellowlegs was also at Lodmoor when we went to Portland in 2017 – but there were many other lovely birds to be seen, and, as I was able to get reasonably good photos, some of these birds will be getting their own blog posts in the coming days. So, here are some tasters of what you can expect to see at this outstanding reserve.
Most of my photos of the Black-tailed godwits are like this first one – heads down, bottoms up – but I did manage to get some head shots.
Just a few years ago Little egrets would have been a rare sight in Britain but not any more. They’re now well settled, breeding and frequently seen.
I love the colours in the Lapwings’ plumage. They look plain black and white from a distance but are, in fact, adorned in rich sumptuous greens. Such elegant birds.
We saw several Snipe poking about in the mud for food.
After the Canada geese, probably the second most abundant species of bird we saw was Teal, many of which were sheltering from the freezing wind behind clumps of reeds. If you look carefully, you can just see a Ruff in the centre near the reeds.
The star of the Lodmoor show, the Lesser yellowlegs, seen here behind a Black-tailed godwit and to the left of 2 lovely Greenshanks. All three of these birds will be getting their own blog posts.
19 Thursday Oct 2017
Tags
birding, birdwatching, British birds, Canada goose, Great white egret, Kingfisher, Lesser yellowlegs, Mediterranean gull, RSPB Lodmoor, Teal, Tringa flavipes
On the way to Portland Bird Observatory last Friday we called in at the RSPB’s Lodmoor Reserve, just outside of Weymouth, to see if we could catch a glimpse of one of their rare visitors, a Lesser yellowlegs (Tringa flavipes), a bird that’s usually more at home in the Americas. Our views weren’t super clear – my photos were taken through tall grasses and bramble – but it was great to see one of these occasional visitors to Europe.
As well as the Lesser yellowlegs (and the Gadwall I blogged about earlier in the week), there was an abundance of other birdlife.
Large numbers of Canada geese flew in while we walked the trails, and there were numerous Teal and Tufted ducks.
A few Mediterranean as well as the more common gull species …
Ruff, Snipe, Little and Great white egrets puddled about in the lagoons; a very confiding Kingfisher posed for photos; two Marsh harriers glided over the distant reed beds; and a Spoonbill was a nice, though distant sighting. I recorded over 30 species of birds at Lodmoor and that was without walking right around the reserve.
17 Tuesday Oct 2017
Tags
Anas strepera, birding, birdwatching, British birds, dabbling duck, duck, Gadwall, Glamorgan Bird Club, Lodmoor, RSPB Lodmoor
Here’s another beauty from last weekend’s wonderful birding trip with the Glamorgan Bird Club. Though this bird is not the rarity of yesterday’s Rustic bunting, it’s not terribly common either, and is ‘Amber listed’, meaning its population has declined in recent years and its situation is being monitored.
This is a male Gadwall (Anas strepera), a very handsome dabbling duck, a little smaller than a Mallard. Sitting on one of the ponds at the RSPB’s Lodmoor Reserve near Weymouth in Dorset, he was looking a little sleepy. Perhaps that’s why he wasn’t bothered about us looking at him, as he actually approached quite near – a bonus for me trying to get reasonable photos. We didn’t hear a peep out of him but, apparently, it’s their chattering call that originally gave the Gadwalls their imitative name.
