The English Solway

Dotterel, Cardurnock, Cumbria

I've spent a lot of time watching golden plover flocks in recent weeks. Last month it was a flock of 1000 at Dinas Dinlle, near Foryd Bay, Caernarfon, which contained a juvenile American Golden Plover, and today in Cumbria on the English Solway, it was a similar size flock which contained a juvenile dotterel. 

They can be quite frustrating, not only very flighty but when they do take to the air they can take an age to land again. They fly up high in group formation almost like starlings, but when they drop down they glide towards the ground, the leaders even dangling their legs as if they are about to land, but then at the last minute they invariably rise high again and often fly off into the distance, sometimes so far that you can't even see the flock, before they return if you're lucky, circling over head to repeat the performance. Often the flock will split with many veering off in a different direction to the rest leaving you unsure as to which flock to follow, and the air is full of their mournful peeps. They can spend 30 minutes or more in the air before landing, and when they do land it's often in a distant field, almost too far even for telescope views, and at other times all you can see is their heads due to the undulations in the ground. Then you have to wait for them to fly and land again, and hope that it's closer and in view. Spectacular no doubt, but frustrating.

Under such circumstances picking out a single, juvenile dotterel amongst the flock is perhaps not as straight forward as you might think. This is far from the spectacular bird you might see on spring migration, and although clearly different from golden plover, it's similar enough to not stand out particularly well in a large flock.

However find it we did, my latest dotterel by two months and it was a very smart bird, somewhat smaller than the golden plover. Then we moved on to look at the geese.....

When we talk of barnacle geese on the Solway Firth, an easy mistake to make is to think that we're talking about Scotland. Actually half of it is in England of course. The English Solway might not have the flagship reserves such as Caerlaverock and Mersehead, but the birding is equally as spectacular, more so some might say, because it feels more wild without the hides, the cafes and the gift shops.

Our first encounter with geese today was with a flock of about 3000 barnacles at Anthorn. They were very close to the road and we spent an hour or so watching them. It's surprising how variable barnacle geese are, especially their facial features. Some have a very 'open' white face, but at the other extreme some have a black forehead which gives them a face not dissimilar to a Canada goose, and there are plenty of birds in between. On the flanks, some are pure white, whilst others are varying shades of grey. Dotted in amongst them today were three white, leucistic birds.

The flock at Anthorn was just the taster though, things really got serious when we arrived at Rockcliffe, where there was a staggering flock of 10,000 birds. This flock was a good bit further away, but they stretched in tight packed ranks right along the saltmarsh. A couple of times they were flushed by something unseen and they took to the air with a breathtaking cacophony of noise and then flew over the mud flats and sand banks of the river Esk before circling back to the saltmarsh and landing again. Wow, that was good! We were looking for a Richardson's cackling goose which had been travelling with the flock, but we were unable to pick it out. There were just too many birds and they were just that bit too distant and it was just that bit too late in the day.

We were rapidly loosing the light as we made our way back to the car, but even now the birding wasn't over, because in front of us as we walked, the swirling murmuration of Starlings near Gretna kept us entertained!

A sign of the times, a little egret, one of several scattered throughout the barnacle goose flock.