Au revoir to so many birds, but ice-cream time will soon be here
In only another week or two all our lovely harbour birds will fly away from us. They won't be back again till the autumn.
Boring old summer intervenes, with empty mudflats, and only a few gulls to look at, as we sit idly on the sand with a sandwich in our hand.
But we do have another week before ice cream days are here again. So now is our chance. My walk gives you a platform for the last orders out of many around the harbours.
Nature watch concentrates on our Concorde bird, the exquisite godwit.
But now let us remind ourselves of what we are so very lucky to have on our doorstep, starting with one of the rarest of our water birds, the eider.
If you're going to see one of these in a harbour on the south coast it will probably be in Chichester channel, between Pilsey and East Head. The drakes are lovely (see photo).
Often only half a dozen here, though always more out to sea off Worthing and Selsey as they pass along the channel.
East Head shore is where you may see our commonest shore bird the dunlin.
These feed at low tide all over the mudflats and then swarm in a huge flock of several thousand birds at high tide.
Chichester harbour is the 12th-best site in the UK for this diminutive wader, with 13,000 birds out of a third of a million in the UK.
The birds make extraordinary patterns in the sky as they weave about like a long scarf, rather in the way that starlings perform around Rome airport.
Dunlins are just one of about seven sandpipers we may get in the harbour. Another is the sanderling which likes the sand flats at East Head, but does not itself like the muds.
Chichester harbour currently has about 45,000 water birds in winter which makes it 26th best in the UK.
That is pretty good really when you think we have more birds than the Medway, or the Tees, or Hamford water on the Essex coast; and more than the Exe, the Tay, or the Beaulieu estuaries.
Of course we cannot compete with the giants like the Wash, Ribble, Morecambe Bay, Solway or Somerset Levels.
We also have full-capacity recreation facilities with small boats. But all sit together well enough.
About 65 different wintering water bird species are usually recorded in the harbours, not including gulls or terns.
Herons, little egrets and the occasional bittern give a wonderful contrast to the tiny waders of the shore.
Diving ducks like mergansers and goldeneye keep us guessing as they vanish underwater for ages.
Brent geese give us memorable flights, making patterns across the sky reminding us so strongly of wilderness.
Two thousand wigeon hurtle magically around the moonlit skies before they vanish east to Siberia and the arctic tundra to breed.
I love to watch the trips of redshank carolling above the tide as they wait for the water to drop.
When it does, 1,500 of them find their own special little corner or mud and get those red beaks down into the tiny snails and worm goodies. How they yelp when you walk past, showing their white wing bars.
Wonderful to see the serious little grey plovers listening for the turn of the worm, or the lapwings standing on the gravel hards at Bosham or Fishbourne.
Pagham harbour with its shoreline walks gives you the haunting song of the curlew as well, until these long beaks disappear to the moors of Lapland.
The county total is well over 1,000 birds, 700 being found in Chichester in March. They will not return until late June.
Any day now the few kingfishers we still have will leave for river banks in the weald.
We shall get a passage of whimbrels in May, and there will be stragglers of various non-breeders, too, to keep us awake as we bask in what surely has to be a beautiful summer after all the cold.
But five months without water birds? Ice creams though.
What do you think? Send a letter to news@chiobserver.co.uk or leave a comment below.
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Weather for Chichester
Monday 28 May 2012
Today
Sunny
Temperature: 13 C to 20 C
Wind Speed: 29 mph
Wind direction: West
Tomorrow
Sunny spells
Temperature: 12 C to 22 C
Wind Speed: 14 mph
Wind direction: West
