Telling Stork from Plover

Kentish Plover (Photo credit: wildxplorer)

An astounding day's birding at Rye Harbour last week. Within moments of arrival we had seen a pair of white storks circling and had good views of a Kentish plover. Both these birds were GB life-ticks for my birding teacher, let alone for me. There were plenty of year ticks during the day too and birds everywhere.

The kentish plover had attracted a battery of friendly twitchers, happy to point us in the right direction and even share their 'scopes, but as we moved on we had plenty of space and even whole hides to ourselves so they must have been content with their rarer prey, while we went on to see huge numbers of gulls, terns, avocets and various other waders.

The sky was grey but the weather mild and even the breeze didn't lower the temperature enough to be uncomfortable so it was a very pleasant day amongst the ponds and gravel pits, albeit not very productive on the shore itself.

Lunch was taken in one of the hides while watching huge numbers of birds, although it has to be said that most of them in this case were black-headed gulls. There were one or two Mediterranean gulls around to point out the error in naming. Med gulls have black heads and their latin name means black-headed gulls while in contrast one can clearly see that the black-headed gulls' heads are actually brownish.

The French call the black-headed gull, the laughing gull (mouette rieuse) but their expression doesn't particularly make this seem very accurate either so presumably it has to do with their sound. Franquin has fun with this mismatch of name and expression in my favourite "bande desinnée" (and role model) Gaston LaGaffe who has one as a kind of fierce and grumpy pet.

Gaston Lagaffe (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Among the other birds seen at Rye were knot and bar-tailed godwits looking very red in their breeding plumage, ringed, grey and golden plover some in breeding plumage and some still wintery, and common, sandwich and little terns. These are always a joy to see with their neatness and agility a pleasant contrast to the big old herring gulls always visible from my windows. Add to that good views of several of my favourite bird of all, the oystercatcher and it adds up to an absolutely delightful day's birding.