A kingfisher shooting straight through a sewer pipe and a mud bath while ringing wild swans. Arend van Dijk is full of stories about bird counting in southwest Drenthe. In the Drenthe Toen podcast 60 years of counting birds he shares his experiences.
During one of his regular rounds, Arend van Dijk saw something that he could hardly believe, even after 60 years of counting birds: a kingfisher that did not fly over the road, but shot through a large sewer pipe under the road. “You see that blue flash and think: where did he go? But he just came out the other side,” says Van Dijk, still full of amazement. It is one of the many moments in which he is still surprised by nature.
In the almost six decades in which Van Dijk from Uffelte conducted his counting rounds, he saw the landscape and thus the bird populations change significantly. Forests became older and richer in deciduous trees, causing an explosive increase in species such as nuthatch and marigold.
The agricultural area actually experienced sharp declines: from 1,200 godwit pairs to just three this year. He calls it disastrous. But in the ‘new nature’, areas that became wetter or were flooded, species returned: “Snipes, once almost disappeared, are now there again in dozens of pairs.”
The heath lost colonies of black-headed gulls and black grouse, but special species returned. The red-backed shrike in particular made a spectacular comeback: from almost disappearing to more than 160 breeding pairs. “Not everything deteriorates. Sometimes nature recovers beautifully,” says Van Dijk.
One of the beautiful stories from Van Dijk’s career is about a rare wild swan that bred in the Wapserveen petgaten. It led to remarkable scenes, including a famous photo of Arend half-naked in the mud while trying to ring a cub. “I wouldn’t do it now, but then I just jumped into the crash,” he laughs. The swan’s descendants still appear in Drenthe. “It feels a bit like they are my swans.”
It is quiet during the walk in the second part of the podcast. “The birds are moulting, you don’t hear much,” Van Dijk explains. But two months earlier you could have listened to blackcaps, glossy-headed tits and hawfinches in the same forest. These are species whose numbers have increased enormously over decades. Only. By counting year in and year out you can see the developments, Van Dijk emphasizes.