This post got lost in the ether between Meinypil’gyno and Slimbridge but Phil since managed to rescue it from his hard drive when he got home.
Phil writes:
Last weekend, the Heritage Cruise arrived with lots of friends on board. Evgeny & Lena Syroechkovsky with their close friend Sasha, Debbie (Director of Conservation at WWT) and some of my old birding pals from the UK. I think they were quite shocked as I hadn’t seen two of them for over 20 years!
Being self-funded, I was hoping to blag a free ride home on the ship, but alas there was no room. So at the moment I am stuck in Meina. Thankfully the Spoon-billed Sandpiper partnership are working to assist me but I know that nobody will feel sorry for me as I am surrounded by Spoonie chicks, a wonderful landscape and other super birds. So I am making the most of things as there is a still lot to do. Both Red-necked Stint and SbS chicks are thriving with the SbS taking bigger flies and bashing them into something they can swallow.
First I went catching mosquitoes for the new arrivals. Waving a net about while looking at Siberian Rubythroat, Buff-bellied Pipits and Bluethroat is something I could get used to!
Yesterday, we took an SbS egg back to a nest in the far west. It had been incubated here away from foxes and having started to hatch, we returned it to Mum and Dad so they had a chick to hatch naturally. Nursing the egg during a 2 hour drive at 5 mph, we saw a White-tailed Eagle, Pacific Golden Plover and the first Red-throated Diver chicks of the summer; all in freezing foggy conditions. The coastal fog even confused a Crested Auklet that headed inland!
After a boat ride across Lake Vaamichka, I watched Nikolay and Roland replace the egg safely.
Waiting until 2pm each day in case a helicopter comes will limit survey work for me, but hopefully there will be other nice things to report.
Phil Palmer (Bird Holidays)
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- All terrain vehicle in the fog (c) Phil Palmer
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- Siberian Rubythroat (c) Phil Palmer
Glad the post (as well as you if you are back with your hard drive) made it through. Very interesting. I wonder how that chick is doing now?
yes me too. I had heard that it became very cold and wet after I left but my Russian freinds have found 2 new broods of SbS since. These were from territorial males that we knew about but who’s nests were not located. (they can be a nightmare to find in difficult terrain).
We do not need to find every single nest & it is wonderful to hear such news as we had feared that these broods may have been taken by the Long-tailed Skuas that descended on the area as I left.
My next hope is that I can see some of them in Myanmar this January.
Thank you for the attempt, keep up the great
work Great work.