Prime Wader Habitat?

In the last post I stated that locally we have very little in the way of wader habitat. While this is true, it is also not true. Certainly we have nothing obvious though. No local marshes, no wader scrapes, no vast expanse of estuarine mud, ie, no location where you might roll up and routinely expect to see a nice collection of waders. We do have several miles of beach though, a tiny estuary at West Bay, the odd bit of seasonal flood and a few little pockets of other stuff. Thursday's Little Stint was on one of the latter. However, we do have stacks of that habitat frequented by all birds capable of flight: the sky.

Like any other group of birds which migrate, or for other reasons use their wings to travel from A to B, waders use the sky on a regular basis. Admittedly their appearances in it might be fleeting, few, and depressingly far-between, but you can absolutely guarantee that waders will at some point be flying over your head. Of course, from a birdwatching point of view, the challenge lies in detecting the blasted things.

Enter nocmig.

Since the beginning of March I've recorded at least 13 species of wader over my home, which is situated three miles inland from the West Dorset coastline and nowhere near any traditional wader habitat. Since recording my first 'returning' wader in the early hours of June 24th, up until dawn this morning a total of eight species have occurred. Here they all are, chronologically in medley format, like a beginner's course in flight-call identification...

The quality is a bit variable, depending on range, weather conditions, etc, but for me this does not detract even a tiny bit from the sheer wowness of them all. Seriously, just brilliant! So, just in case you are a beginner, and want to know whether you identified them all correctly...

1. Curlew. A regular migrant along the coast here, but I can't recall whether I've seen one on the deck yet.

2. Common Sandpiper. Another regular migrant encountered on the coast, and sometimes on or close to the shore.

3. Redshank. I can probably count on one hand the number of times I've seen Redshank locally. Not common. You can just about detect that two or more birds feature in the recording.

4. Green Sandpiper. This is only my second nocmig Green Sandpiper, and the only place I've actually seen them locally is the Bride Valley Fish Farm, near Burton Bradstock.

5. Oystercatcher. Again, a fairly regular sight on the coast, and one of my most regular nocmig waders too.

6. Whimbrel. Commonly encountered in flocks on spring migration, but in autumn I reckon most local records will be ones and twos. This recording clearly involves at least three or more birds. They were audible for more than four minutes! Such an evocative sound.

7. Dunlin. Quite a faint recording, and just a single bird I reckon. A regular migrant locally, but again like so many others, usually coastal fly-bys or briefly decked on the beach.

8. Little Ringed Plover. A lovely clear recording at 02:08 this morning, these are the loudest two of a nice series of calls. It's so good to hear the volume increase as a bird approaches, and fade away as it flies past. Thus far I have seen just one local LRP, at the West Bex Mere in April this year. And I have three or four definite nocmig records from 2020, beginning July 14th.

One lesson from all this is that nocmig might significantly influence a species' perceived local status. For example, I wonder how many Bridport records of Stone-curlew there are? Very few I'll bet. Yet just my nocmig records alone reveal that it is possibly annual, or has been for two years at least!

And just as everyday birding can throw up the occasional exciting rarity, so can nocmig. Wader-wise I would like to mention two recent stunners. The first is Mark Pearson's amazing American Golden Plover up on the east coast of Yorkshire on May 13th, which Mark has written up here. The second is even more staggering. Recording in Ireland, Seán Ronayne had already struck nocmig gold on June 24th with a Baillon's Crake in County Wicklow, but topped it in spectacular fashion just a few days later. Posting on the nocmig WhatsApp group I belong to, Seán wrote that on July 2nd he had recorded a Semi-palmated Plover over Lisagriffin on Mizen Head, at the south-western tip of County Cork. Along with the recording was a detailed account of the identification process. Fascinating stuff.

Fascinating stuff indeed. If you believe it...

One thing that appears to go hand-in-hand with the relatively recent popularising of nocmig is a big fat dose of scepticism. I suspect that some of that is based on little more than an almost instinctive resistance to something 'new' by a minority of old stagers, but that aside, isn't it quite reasonable to view with great caution a rarity record that consists of just a few brief noises and some squiggles on a laptop screen?

Back in late May I think, a heard-only Little Crake was reported from Wicken Fen in Cambridgeshire. By all accounts it was distant and faint, but eventually it was sound-recorded using a parabolic reflector. Unfortunately the Little Crake proved to be actually a Shelduck. At which point the eye-rolling sceptics could have smirkingly pointed out the folly of all this sound-only nonsense. However, I can't help feeling that the Little Crake episode has exactly the opposite effect, and in fact reinforces the case for the defense. Because, in the end, a correct identification was made. The same as happens on a regular basis with sight records, careful investigation by experienced birders revealed the error. No big deal.

And sound-only records can be analysed to a minutely forensic degree. If the sound quality is good enough (and it doesn't have to be brilliant) a sonogram (aka spectrogram) can be as diagnostic as a wing formula. My Night Heron last year proved that to me. And personally I have no doubts at all about the veracity of Mark's AGP or Seán's Semi-P. Both have been approached with a healthy caution, and demonstrate to me the amazing potential of nocmig recording. I do sometimes wonder why nocmig seems to have such a minority appeal though. As hinted at by my own Stone-curlew records, there is so much to be discovered...

Talking of scepticism: Ortolan Bunting. [winking emoji]