Arrivals and depatures
It’s that time of year again: migration is upon us. The bird airport has opened.
End of September, early October, sees that last few remaining swallows and house martins waiting at their gate, getting their last feeds in before making their journey south. In terms of warblers, we are still hearing chiffchaffs occasionally. They are known to sometimes winter in this area but there’s no evidence of that at Caerlaverock thus far. On the other hand, we haven’t heard willow or grasshopper warblers or whitethroats in a while so they will have already checked their luggage and headed home.
On the 1st of October, we welcomed our first whooper swan of the season, all the way out on the merse – a day earlier than last year. If you can rely on anything with nature, it is migration!
We are expecting more and more geese to arrive – at the moment there are between 2000 and 4000 on site at any one time. These again arrive very reliably at the mid to end of September. The pink-footed geese are moving through the site like clockwork as well, our last count was around 500. As we move further into October, more teal, shoveller and wigeon will arrive for their winter residence.
Yesterday there were high tides which cause water to get held in these large pools at the top of the merse and then become teeming with birds – this is where we saw the first whooper swan. Ducks on one side, waders on another, geese hanging around the water. As soon as water is there it brings life in, like an oasis in a desert. A volunteer estimated that there were maybe 10,000+ birds out there yesterday: shelduck, pintail, lapwing, wigeon, teal, golden plover. Fiona said she’d never seen anything like it in her five years of volunteering here.
Caerlaverock is vibrating with life at this time of year: the arrivals and departures board has got everyone scheduled and even if there are some slight delays, everyone shows up eventually – hopefully their cases do too!
Words by Jake Goodwin (written 2nd October)
