Another lovely morning along Otterspool Prom 30082022
It’s a few days later and I’m back on the plot, with another walk along the Prom beckoning. The robin has been for its suet treat, four noisy parakeets have flown over, and I have found three small, brown pellets – packed with thin white hairs and other, less identifiable, bits – on the heavy slate ‘table’ under the old cherry tree where the bird feeders hang. A quick DM with a fellow birder and, yes, they probably have been hawked up by a tawny owl. The only one of the UK’s regular species that I’ve never seen. The closest encounter came on holiday in North Wales in June this year, when a male tawny woke me at 3am “whooing” in the pitch black night outside my room. It feels like this bird is trolling me – but it’s still very exciting!
Tawny owl pellets 30082022
After a couple of hours, I head to the Prom again. It’s low tide this morning and there are black-tailed godwits galore ranged along the shoreline, making the most of the marvellous Mersey mud. The majority still wear their gorgeous chestnut breeding finery on neck and breast, although some are fading to grey (if you’re a certain age, you should be hearing Steve Strange’s voice right about now). There are redshanks, a few oystercatchers, and common, black-headed and herring gulls with them, and a small flock of turnstones on the seaweed-covered rocks (photo from 2020).
Turnstones roosting along the Prom 23082020
People are stopping to admire the godwits, beautiful visitors who have flown all the way from their breeding grounds in Iceland to spend the winter here. A few pairs breed in the UK and will now be on their way back to Africa for the winter; the birds we see in the winter are different from those we see in the summer. They are also different sub-species (Limosa limosa islandica and Limosa limosa limosa – the latter so good they named them three times).
But, being serious for a moment, there was a video on Twitter over the bank holiday weekend showing sewage being discharged into the estuary here, and I hope that this awful practice will not harm any of these birds or their food sources, or indeed any part of this amazing ecosystem – a life-saving resource for the birds that overwinter along the Mersey Estuary, and for those that call it home all year round. Raw sewage is being pumped into our rivers and seas on a shockingly frequent basis – just one more abhorrent practice against nature that we can and must agitate to end.
For more about black-tailed godwits: https://www.wildlifetrusts.org/wildlife-explorer/birds/wading-birds/black-tailed-godwit