Special Visitors

In just a weeks time we will have been working on Aride for a year and we will soon start to see things going full circle. Like the change of the monsoons, one bringing visitors the other breeding birds, or the turtle season - full of highs and lows, much like the time of flowering Pisonia and its deadly sticky seeds.





Well November is still a new month for us and it has been the time for migrants bringing plenty of new visitors of the feathered variety to the island. Although Aride has many thousands of pairs of birds on its 73ha, it does fall short on variety, so the arrival of some new species has been quite a highlight. For me they have been what I would call quality birds too, like the Crab Plover.

A really bizarre looking species with a bill like a tomahawk and legs, well it had a stride almost the length of one of my feet, its legs are extremely long! Very Avocet like in movement, but purpose built to catch crabs, a long stride and a bill like a chisel. I would watch them stab a ghost crab and then like a young boy would do with a spider, pull its legs off one by one, then run around with the body in its beak. They seldom flew anywhere, but made full use of their long legs and ran to where they needed to go.

Then there were the sanderlings, although common in the UK, here they have absolutely no fear of humans at all and we have been able to walk within a couple of foot away. They scurry around our feet as we haul the boat up the beach and run up to us as we sit and wait for turtles to do their thing. Just the other evening we were waiting for a turtle and a volunteer was eating his tea on the beach, he spilt some veggie curry on the sand, then to our amazement it was eaten by a sanderling as it scurried past.

There have been the little brown jobs as well, like the lesser and greater sand plovers, which in summer plumage look stunning, but by the time they get to Aride they are both a rather dull brown colour. Still not to be knocked they are a welcome addition to the group of turnstones that frequent the beach daily.

However the stars of the show so far have to be the blue-cheeked bee eaters, they arrived last week and are still here. They are magical and seem very fitting for a tropical island, with their bright colours and wonderful call. We have had up to 18 along the beach crest, and currently there is at least a group of 8, a mix of adults and juveniles. Some of the adults have still got their blue-cheeks, together with a yellow chin patch and rusty throat.

The beach crest is their favoured haunt, where they seem very successful at hawking insects; they are particularly active at dawn and dusk and tend to go quiet in the heat of the day – like most of us!

Unfortunately none of these birds are immune to Pisonia and both the sanderlings and bee eaters have been a victim of it, the sanderling managed to deal with it, but the bee eater needed a helping hand – for which we obliged.

That’s one thing about life on a remote island you never quite know what will turn up next and that can happen with both birds and people!!