2023-08-02 12:50:00
Bird migration started in July. What we call summer is rather autumn for many bird species. The first siskins and crossbills have arrived from Scandinavia. The first starlings from Central and Eastern Europe are coming our way. The first swifts leave. Adult cuckoos preceded them. Sandpipers and horsemen of various stripes have completed their northern breeding season and are feeding themselves with us during their southward journey.
Sandpipers arrive on beaches and sandbars, knot and curlew sandpipers on the mudflats, lesser sandpipers along inland waterways and dunlins everywhere. There are also black riders, now still in their beautiful black summer outfit. Equestrians are a family of wading birds, which also includes redshanks and ruffs.
Gamecocks are showing themselves now. I recently went on an excursion to the Onneres, an old cultural landscape near Haren, which has been secured by Land van Ons. I am a member of that. A low next to the Onneres is also part of it and has recently been allowed to get wet. While the guide tells something regarding the buckwheat on the es, I scan that shallow puddle with my binoculars.
A black-tailed godwit, two storm gulls, a sandpiper (also a rider), two white holes (also riders) and a few ruffs walk along the bank. The ruff nets resemble redshanks. The roosters are a lot larger and still have remnants of their white, brown or black courtship plumage. There are more roosters because they do not interfere with the offspring and can therefore start the autumn migration earlier.
What kind of birds are those, one participant asks. Gamecocks? Already? Doesn’t that mean the breeding season has failed? Well, not necessarily. It is true that the ruffs are not doing well – in the Netherlands they hardly breed anymore, but the decline is now also underway abroad. But the fact that there are now ruffs is simply because they travel early.
Three times a week, biologist Koos Dijksterhuis writes regarding something that grows or blooms. Read his previous Nature Diaries here.
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