Knee-deep, following the banks of the Texel stream, a white stilt-walker, almost one meter tall, came towards me. Unmistakably a spoonbill (Platalea leucorodia), who sieved the water with long strokes from left to right with his flattened beak end and sometimes suddenly threw his head back to let a caught shrimp slide down the back of his throat. With its beautiful crest, orange-yellow throat, immaculate white tuxedo and dark legs, the spoonbill looked powerful and graceful. Much more one ‘spatula blanche’as the French call it, then spoonbill.
Polished carbon
Concentrated fishing, the bird quickly approached until it looked up from a few feet away, noticed me sitting by the water’s edge and stopped. At spoonbill eye level I saw the feathers of its crest moving in the wind and was amazed at the size, shape and striping pattern of its unusually shaped beak. As if made of polished carbon, this shiny black ‘spatule’ seemed to be glued to its white-crested head. We were both motionless for a few seconds, then the bird turned silently away from me, sprang up and disappeared from view with a few wingbeats, leaving me amazed.
The spoonbill is a Eurasian ibis-like species for which the Netherlands is an important refuge within Europe. Thanks to the ban on agricultural poisons, the absence of foxes on the Wadden Islands and years of protection, almost four thousand pairs now breed in fifty colonies in our country. In more and more places, ever closer to the built-up areas, these elegant birds enrich our reed beds in summer to spend the winter in southern Europe, or even further south in the tidal areas of Senegal and Mauritania.
For spoonbills, the return journey across the Sahara in the spring in particular proves to be risky
The migration of spoonbills to and from their wintering grounds arose as an adaptation to the food scarcity here in winter. However, the risks of the long journey must outweigh the danger of wintering here. After all, the migratory period is the most dangerous time in their existence for birds with a mortality rate that is six times higher than during the breeding and wintering period. For spoonbills, the return journey across the Sahara in the spring in particular proves to be risky.
The northeast trade wind, a strong wind created by an interplay of earth rotation and temperature differences between the subtropics and the equator, makes the return journey more difficult, so that one in five spoonbills does not survive the crossing of the Sahara. In response, more and more birds are avoiding the Sahara route and wintering in southern Europe. Supported by the warmer winters, several hundred spoonbills do not even leave our country at all. For example, the graceful ‘spatule blanche’ adapts to the changing circumstances and can be seen here more and more often during summer and winter.