View From The Shed by Volunteer Shaun - A BIRD OF GOOD TASTE

A BIRD OF GOOD TASTE

…and still it keeps raining. It’s been wetter than a submarine’s number plate here in the Dearne Valley for months. I’m sure that it’s been the same wherever you live. Those nice people at the Met Office tell me that the last eighteen months have been officially the wettest since records began, and I can believe it. 

This week I was working at Old Moor when yet another terrible storm blew in. Actually we had four seasons in one day. Sleet (in mid-April), torrential rain, clear blue skies and bright sunshine, and wind so bad that I was in fear of my Welcome Shed being picked up and hurled into a tornado. And I wasn’t even wearing my Ruby Slippers.

It was no surprise then that a passing flock of birds decided that they’d had enough of battling the elements and dropped in to weather out the weather at our Old Moor reserve. The few visitors that had made the effort to see what was around were rewarded with the sight of 32 very windswept and bedraggled Black-Tailed Godwits arriving and immediately hunkering down with their collective heads under collective wings.

Let’s get the name out of the way first. You should know by now that I love etymology almost as much as I love ornithology. The word ‘Godwit’ has nothing to do with the smartness of any deity. There are two theories as to where it actually comes from, neither of which is really convincing but I’m just reporting the facts as I know them. The first idea is that it’s an onomatopoeic name, like Chiffchaff or Cuckoo. Followers of this theory claim that, like so many other birds, it says its own name. I’m not so sure of that, to me it sounds like they’re saying “Dow-a-chick, Dow-a-chick” rather than “God-wit, God-wit”, but hey, they have to have some name, right? And they’ve been called something like “Gode-whyte” since the mid-fifteen hundreds at least.

Personally I like the other theory better but it too is a little speculative. Some people believe that Godwits were once deemed nice to eat (hence the title of this blog) and as such it was referred to as the “good creature” or, in Old English, the “god whita”. I can’t comment on how tasty and nutritious they are as they were all sold out last time I visited my local Tesco but I’m sure that our ancestors knew of many other creatures that were good eating too.

However they got their name, all Godwits are striking birds. Large by wading bird standards, they can be identified in Spring and Summer by the rusty orange colour on their throat, chest and belly. They have long legs to walk around in relatively deep water, and a long, straight bill that can probe deep down into mud to get at the food buried far below the reach of most other waders. It’s another example of a bird that’s evolved to fill a particular niche feeding pattern.

Many of the Black-Tailed Godwits that migrate here for the Summer breed in mainland Europe or Iceland, unlike the very similar Bar-Tailed Godwit, which breeds higher up in the Arctic. But a few Black-Tails do hang around all year to make their eggs here in England. The current official RSPB figure is that we have 53 breeding pairs on our shores. Sadly their population numbers have plummeted both here and abroad leading to the RSPB placing them on their red, ‘most at risk’ list. In the 19th century they were extinct in Britain. About a century ago they began to return but even now there is not a sustainable British population. That’s why the RSPB in conjunction with the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust (WWT) instigated ‘Project Godwit’ in 2017 to secure the future of these birds in England. This has involved improvement of their breeding environments and, crucially, gathering eggs from wild parents, raising the resulting chicks free from predation and the vagaries of the British weather and, once they have reached a viable age, releasing these chicks back into the wild. This intervention (a process known as ‘headstarting’) has resulted in around five times more chicks reaching breeding age than if they had been left with their parents. It’s a bold and perhaps controversial strategy but it works. Over 40% of the UK’s breeding pairs of Black-Tailed Godwits now includes at least one of these headstarted birds. 

If you’re unsure as to whether you’ve seen a Black- or a Bar-Tailed Godwit, then the best way to tell is to wait until it takes flight and look at them from below. Black-Wits have a distinctive white patch on their rump and white banding along their wings. Both of these are missing from the Bar-Wit, which also have, unsurprisingly, white barring across their tails.

This particular group of 32 birds didn’t stay with us at Old Moor for very long. Once the weather had calmed down they were off again, continuing on their original migration route, but there will be more throughout the Spring, I’m sure of it. We usually have some with us in the warmer months so keep an eye out for them next time you visit.

Oh, and I have one final Godwit fact. It’s the National Bird of the Netherlands, This, and the colouring of their national sports teams, hark back to the fact that their Royal Family were historically descended from the House of Orange. Every day is a school day, but if you only take away one thing from this blog make it this. The Black-Tailed Godwit is still critically endangered but the RSPB funds raised by your monthly subscriptions, car parking fees and even the purchase of coffee and cake in our cafes has gone towards giving them a fighting chance at survival through ‘Project Godwit’. They’re in a better state now than they were a decade ago and you have helped. Thank you