Natural Selection

Today I went down to some wader habitat at the south of the island near the Riu Touraeg hotel. The area at Lacacao has a decent track record for shorebirds over the years, and is well known for a Willet turning up this spring. Willet is one of the few American waders to have been seen this side of the Atlantic with no British records. This bird had moved to the island of Sal so I wasn’t optimistic about seeing it.

In the event I could hardly miss it. A group of shorebirds took flight and one of them had an astonishing wing pattern (see above picture) and a screaming call. It turned out it had been seen back on Boa Vista last week but I had been blissfully unaware. You can count the number of Willets seen in Europe and North Africa on two hands, and this as far as I know the only one currently in situ. A great bird to see and a World tick for me.

The Yanks didn’t stop there. I had to do a double take when the first bird I saw through the binoculars was a White-rumped Sandpiper. I had to do a second double take when it turned out there were five of them. With a keen eye you can just about make them all out in the picture below (the one furthest right is not the easiest to pick out).

In all there were 15 species of waders on the pool, as well as a Spoonbill. They included 50 Sanderling, 25 Curlew Sandpipers, several Ruffs as well as the noisy resident Black-winged Stilt and Kentish Plovers. It was excellent birding, even better than I had been led to hope for from previous reports from the site on eBird. My camera got knocked and the settings were wrong for most of the pictures but here’s another of the Willet, see if you can work out which one it is. It looks very different if you don’t see the wing patter.

And here’s a better picture from Dick Daniels, used with permission under Wikimedia commons licence. If you have the time and inclination you can look into why Willet is now split into two species / subspecies. The Boa Vista bird and the one below are Western Willets.