A flock of plovers had gathered on the edge of an artificial lagoon that will soon be partitioned and filled in until the seabed chokes on ash and dies beneath a blanket of soil. From afar, there appeared to be nothing on the sliver of sand that separates a slope of rocks from the high water. But we press on and flush a sequence of birds with every few yards down the bund. Each flight of Mongolian, grey and pacific golden plovers, some bearing traces of their summer dress, skims the water with Arctic whistles and circles the bank before landing some distance away.
No larger than pigeons and doves but wielding stouter bills and delicate, cursorial limbs, the plovers had arrived from steppe and tundra, seeking the warmth of equatorial flats. Some will continue their journey until they reach shores of southern summer. But a few are happy to linger and feed off the neglected flanks of a landfill where a tidal cove of mud and silt has sucked in the spawn of the sea and bristles with invertebrate life. Having traded their courtship hues of blacks, golds and russets for a wintercoat of grey, tan and tawn, the migrants join their resident kin on the lower reaches of the seawall where they chase insects, polychaetes and ambulant shellfish in an invisible flurry of avian activity.
Other visitors from the far north lurk in the mangroves, where they await the daily rise of the outlying mudflats and sandbars. Trapped in landlocked pools or rocky cauldrons, crabs, shrimp, worms, clams, snails and tiny fish then face an assault of bills that probe, peck, stab and sweep for prey in murky waters. Whimbrels reach into deep holes to pluck out small crustaceans that are rinsed before a gullet trip. Greenshanks lunge at small fish and shrimp in the shallows, while common sandpipers forage like feathered mice over boulders, roots and sand, their heads and tails in constant motion with clockwork bobs.
Grey herons criss-cross the island on forays between a nearby rookery and their feeding ground. Brahminy kites by the dozen circle the landfill's active cells, lured perhaps by rodents and reptiles that were in turn drawn to the scent of burning swarms. A recently filled cell lies barren by the bund, the trunks and bare twigs of a rare mangrove tree holding fort in a scorched corner where hardier coastal shrubs still survive and provide perches for blue-tailed bee-eaters and a young tiger shrike.
Spotted doves pitter and patter on the weed-lined track. A gang of scaly-breasted munias erupt from the reeds by a fan flower tree, piping and psitting as they head towards the imagined safety of reclaimed grasslands. Chipping in false alarm, paddyfield pipits, whose plumage gives the waders a run for their protection money, rocket off with a metallic din before they plummet into another patch of brown.
And shortly before twilight, two sea eagles head inland, their fingers almost touching between lazy brushes of broad wings. The barn and pacific swallows who swing through the rhu trees and rest on signs of prohibition soon vanish, surrendering the sky to clicking bats who feast on a flight of moths as savanna nightjars wheel over the bund, interrupting a slow walk back to the pier with sharp cries of excitement for yet another season of birds on the roost.
Comments