A days outing photographing this unique shorebird~

For the very first website blogpost, I’m going to start off with one of the most diverse groups of birds. Waders, also known as shorebirds have a large number of species that categorise into plovers, sandpipers, godwits and more. In the UK we are lucky enough to have a great coastline with a range of habitats, which holds some of the best wintering wader populations on the continent with several breeding species, mostly on the uplands of England and Scotland but also at a few southern sites.

To start of my this series, I’m going to focus on the Avocet which I photographed in the same area on the two days I visited a wetland reserve in the summer of 2018 that runs along the Severn river in Gloucestershire.

Most wildlife enthusiasts favourite wading bird, the Avocet is one species I had encounterd on previous occasions but this turned out to be my best session photographing them. There were several pairs nesting around the reserve but those kept quite a distance away from the hides but there was one pair that surprisingly only had a single chick and stayed towards our end of the the lake/wetland scrape.

The adults were extremely protective over the last chick they had. Since this was the ‘last’ as waders generally have several and this one was still quite small, perhaps only hatched within the past two weeks. In this shot it shows the mother sending out a warning call as it guards over the chick (in the foreground), showing it’s protective stature.

In the top right picture you can see one of parents attacking a group of Black-Tailed Godwits. Although not a threat, the parent Avocets wanted the chick to have it’s own space and not have to compete with any other species.

During the day it was quite hot and humid, bringing out loads of mosquitoes which were carpeting the shallow ends of the lake. The chick fed mostly in this area where there was a good concentration of food to eat.