Sheet 01DeltaKlaipėda
Spring flood in the Nemunas delta: where the water puts the birds
The delta is at its best during the three or four weeks when it is least convenient. Meltwater comes down the Nemunas, the polders behind the dykes fill, the road out to the island goes under, and that is exactly when the birds arrive.
- Logged
- Typed up
- Reading
- 7 minutes
- Coast
- Klaipėda County
The week the road goes under
The flood is not an event so much as a fortnight of arithmetic. Meltwater from upstream meets whatever the wind is doing to the lagoon, and if a westerly is holding the water back at the same time, the polders behind the dykes fill quickly and stay full. In most years the peak falls somewhere between the last week of March and the middle of April. In 2024 it came early and had dropped away again by the twelfth, which is why this entry is dated later than the birds deserved.
I do not try to get out onto the island while the road is under water. The interesting ground is the edge in any case, and the edge can be worked from the dyke tops on the landward side, where a car makes a serviceable hide and a telescope on the window ledge is steadier than a tripod in that wind. Two mornings a week, starting an hour after sunrise, parked in the same three places, so that the counts still mean something when I line them up in May.
Noted on the sheet
- Water level first, wind direction second, birds third
- The same three parking places every visit, or the counts drift
- A telescope on a car window beats a tripod in an April westerly
- Boots, and no plan that depends on the flood road being open
Reading the edge, not the middle
Flooded grassland sorts birds by depth, and the depth changes daily. The sheet of open water in the middle of a polder holds swans and the deeper-water ducks, and it is easy to look at because the light sits on it. Most of what I want is along the lip, where the water is an inch or two deep and the grass still shows through. Ruff feed there, godwits probe there, and the geese come off the fields to drink and bathe at the edge rather than out in the middle.
Scanning that lip takes longer than it looks. I work along it at twenty times magnification, slowly, then come back the other way at forty, and the second pass almost always adds a species the first one walked straight over. Distant ruff in April are a scatter of grey-brown blobs until one of them stands up. Twice now I have counted a flock of lapwing, packed up, and worked out from the photographs afterwards that a third of the birds on the far edge were golden plover in half plumage.
Ruff, godwit and the first black terns
Ruff are the reason I keep coming back in April. The first birds are dull and could be almost anything at range, but by the third week the males are growing the collars that give the species its name, and a flooded field with thirty of them on it in half-made white, black and chestnut is not a subtle sight. They display on a dry rise, if the water has left one, in a loose ring, mostly during the first two hours of light. Black-tailed godwits feed in the same shallows and move on earlier in the season than I expect them to, every single year.
The first black terns are a date I write inside the front cover of the notebook. In 2022 it was the twenty-eighth of April, in 2023 the twenty-fourth, in 2024 the nineteenth, and I do not believe three years of dates mean anything yet except that somebody is watching. They come in low over the flood, feeding into the wind, and for the first few days there are five or six rather than the hundreds of June. A whiskered tern among them is worth a second look and, around here, usually turns out to be a black tern in better light.
What goes in the notebook before I drive home
The entry gets written in the car with the engine off, before the drive back, because the version I write at home three hours later is tidier and less true. Date, the water level in rough terms, wind direction and force, cloud, and whatever temperature the car claims. Then the counts, in the order I made them, with an estimate marked as an estimate. A flock of geese put up by a harrier gets counted twice by anybody honest, and the notebook should show that rather than quietly average it away.
What I have learned to add is the negative. If there were no cranes on the wet grass where the dyke turns, that line goes in, because in three of the last four springs there were, and an absence on the same date in the same place is the one thing my notebook does better than my memory. The same goes for the mornings when an outboard cleared the whole polder at five past six and I saw almost nothing. Those pages look like waste, and they are the ones I reread.
Noted on the sheet
- Water level, wind and cloud before any species goes down
- Counts in the order they were made, estimates marked as such
- Birds that were absent, not only the birds that were present
- Whatever flushed the flock, and roughly at what time