Godwits and goals

Another windy day on the west coast a while back, and I popped round the back of the dump for a bit of birdwatching. It doesn’t sound promising but it is, because behind the dump is the start of the North Shore which sweeps round to Barassie beach hugging coastal route 7 of the National Cycle Network. When the tide is out it’s a massive sandflat full of shorebirds enjoying what the Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust call ‘that amorphous zone between water and land’. Oystercatchers and curlews were joined by gulls and crows, and in among them one medium-sized bird with all the confusing characteristics of many waders - sandy brown and white plumage, backwards knees, long pointy bill - but this bill was half pink and half black. It was a bar-tailed godwit - which sounds like it should be in a Harry Potter book, but instead featured in the Guardian just a few days later as being the species to set a new world record for avian non-stop flight by flying more than 12,000km from Alaska to New Zealand. Thousands of them start to arrive in the UK from Autumn – either passing through on the journey further south from breeding grounds in the Arctic, or stopping off here for the winter. Apparently one of them fancied a break on the North Shore, and it was a new sighting for me. The RSPB magazine this month had a wonderful article by Nicola Chester about the importance of continuing getting outside in winter and setting wildlife goals for yourself – “Bin your inner fair-weather self and embrace this season of fog, frost, rain, wind and snow.” If my little godwit can make it 12,000km through the end-of-year weather, then I will welcome my own challenge of getting out regularly in the winter to see what new things I can see…