Boa Vista birding – the middle chapters

I got into a birding routine on holiday walking round Rabil lagoon and back to the hotel one day, and returning to the south on alternate days. EBird showed a sewage pond a couple of miles away from the wader scrapes at Lacacao, so the second time I went south I went looking for it. I almost missed it, but some excited Black-winged Stilts pointed me in the right direction.

Over several visits there was quite a bit of interest here. Up to five Black Kites were around. There were also several Glossy Ibis, good numbers of egrets and Spoonbills and a female Teal on earlier visits replaced by a Moorhen on latter ones. There were also plenty of small waders including Wood Sandpipers, Ruff, Turnstone and Greenshanks.

The ribeira adjacent to the sewage pond also held a few new birds for the trip. These included several Snipe, and up to three Yellow Wagtails. The Yellow Wagtails I could get close to were all young birds, and probably can’t be assigned to subspecies. The picture at the top was on my first visit, the one below on the last.

The wader scrape area was never quite as busy on any other subsequent visit than the first day but was always good value. To use the obvious joke it was ‘will it or won’t it’ with the Willet, which was there on precisely half the visits. It was a great privilege to see a bird as rare as this in the Western Palearctic at close range.

Up to six White-rumped Sandpipers also lingered throughout, and thought the numbers fluctuated they were all present and correct on my last visit.

At Rabil lagoon the Yank waders quickly dried up. One evening I was scanning the expanse when a duck came in off the sea. It flew directly past me before landing half way down the water. It was clearly a female of young Ring-necked Duck. It was tempting to imagine it was fresh in from a transatlantic crossing as it bathed and started diving for food, though it may equally have moved from another island. One had been on Sal earlier in the day but was also seen subsequently so presumably a different individual. I’ve borrowed Uwe Thom’s picture of that individual to show what the bird I saw looked like.