Sheet 05The spitKlaipėda
Late August on the spit: the first raptors over the grey dunes
Autumn on this coast begins while the beaches are still busy. The last week of August puts honey buzzards over the dune ridge and wheatears on every walkway post, and almost nobody on the sand below is looking up.
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- Klaipėda County
Getting there: the ferry decides
Everything on the spit starts with the crossing, and in late August the crossing is not mine to control. The passenger ferry from the old town takes ten minutes and runs often; the car ferry further north is a different proposition in high season, with queues that can swallow an hour of the morning. I have settled on going over as a foot passenger with a bicycle, which turns the southern half of the forest into a thirty-minute ride and takes the queue out of the day altogether.
The other timing question is the light. The dune ridge runs roughly north to south, so a morning watch has the sun behind you and an afternoon watch has it straight in your eyes, and raptors crossing high in the afternoon are silhouettes with no plumage in them at all. I am on the ridge by seven and off it by eleven, which also gets me back through the forest before the day has properly filled the cycle path.
Noted on the sheet
- Foot ferry with a bicycle; the car queue costs an hour in August
- On the ridge by seven, off it again by eleven
- Morning light behind you, afternoon light against you
- Water for four hours, because there is none out on the sand
The ridge, and why the height matters
The grey dunes run for kilometres, and their useful quality is elevation. Fifty metres of sand is not a mountain, but it puts you above the pine canopy with the sea on one side and the lagoon on the other, and a bird crossing the spit has to pass through a band of sky you can actually watch. Buzzards and sparrowhawks come over low in the first hour and higher as the air warms, and by ten they are specks and the count turns into a guess with a number attached.
Honey buzzards are the late-August bird, and they do not hang about. Most of mine are single birds going south in a steady flap and glide, in view for forty seconds and then gone, so the identification has to be made inside that time or not at all. I got it wrong for two seasons by looking for the head shape at ranges where no head shape is visible. I work from the wing base, the tail length and the way the bird carries itself, which is less satisfying and a great deal more reliable.
Wheatears, shrikes and the small stuff
Looking down is as productive as looking up, and a good deal easier. The open sand and its scattered marram hold wheatears from the third week of August, in ones and twos along the ridge line and on the wooden walkway posts, dropping to feed and flicking up again. Red-backed shrikes sit on the outermost dead pines at the forest edge, and a juvenile shrike in barred brown took me longer to name the first time than I care to admit. Tawny pipits are the ones I most want and most often miss.
In the pines behind, the forest birds are moving in their own quiet way. Crested tits and coal tits go through in loose parties, crossbills pass overhead calling and are gone before you have found them against the sky, and a nutcracker will cross a firebreak once a morning if you are lucky and never when a camera is ready. None of that shows up in a total the way a raptor count does, and all of it belongs in the entry, because a September with no crossbills over the spit is a different September.
Noted on the sheet
- Wheatears on the walkway posts from about the twentieth
- Juvenile shrikes are brown and barred; do not rush them
- Crossbills are a call overhead, not a bird in a tree
- Log the forest birds even though they spoil a tidy count
What late August tells me about October
The honest answer is: rather less than I would like. Four seasons of notes suggest that an early honey buzzard passage is not much of a guide to what the finches do six weeks later, and that the two are driven by weather a long way from here and from each other. What late August does tell me is whether the season has started on time, and that single fact is worth the mornings on its own.
It also sets the habit. Going out in the last week of August means the first cold morning at the cape is not the first morning of the year with a telescope, and the difference between what I notice when I am rusty and what I notice when I am practised is embarrassing. The birds are the point, but the practice is why the notebook improves. That, and the fact that a grey dune at seven in the morning with nobody else on it is a very good place to be.