Shifting baseline syndrome at Hesketh Out Marsh and Banks Marsh

It says something about how things have changed over the years when I can go to Hesketh Out Marsh followed by Banks marsh and see six spoonbills, great white egret, probably around 40 little egrets and four avocets and still come away feeling a little sad and disappointed, when just thirty years ago I might have considered it one of the best birding days of my life. The reason for these feelings of sadness and disappointment is the lack of waders I saw on the Ribble today. 

Over the past 20 years we've all become accustomed to these wonderful egrets and spoonbills, so much so that we now expect to see them and they barely warrant a mention in any quick scan of the saltmarsh. For sure they are very welcome new additions to the local avifauna, but the other side of the coin is the devastating lose of waders. 

On a single day in September 1983 I saw a flock of 85 little stints at Frodsham marsh but 37 years later it seems like there's barely that many in the whole of the UK. Just look at Birdguides, one little stint here, two there, but very rarely do you hear of double figure counts from anywhere. Today I saw one and it felt like a mega tick. Curlew sandpipers have fared little better, a flock of 24 at Hesketh Out Marsh yesterday was considered likely to be the largest flock in the UK at the moment. Today I saw one in flight.

This is both extremes of shifting baseline syndrome. On the one hand, it would be easy for new birders to dismiss egrets and spoonbills as a common sight on estuaries around the UK and perhaps not realise how rare they were just a generation ago, whilst at the other extreme the baseline for what is a good wader count decreases as each generation passes, so that birders in years to come might wistfully look back at the days of a flock of 10 little stints when the generation before expected to see 80 and before that who knows how many? 

Why does this matter, well if you don't recognise the spectacular growth in egret and spoonbill numbers over a short period of time then perhaps you also won't see them for what they are, climate change indicator species, and if your baseline for a good little stint count is 10 then perhaps you won't recognise that actually even 10 represents a dramatic decline in numbers from just 30 years ago. This is shifting baseline syndrome, each generation sets it's expectations of what is good a little lower than the last because they weren't around to see what things were like two or three generations earlier.

Whilst new additions are welcome, they don't make up for the loses, I'd sooner go back to the days of large numbers of arctic waders in the UK and leave the egrets and spoonbills for holidays to the Mediterranean.

Also today, an injured and over summering tundra bean goose and a couple of pink-footed geese, plus two peregrine and a merlin. Not a bad day really, just a bit sad. I seem to have a lot of sad days at the moment....