What's your favourite bird?

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, 11 February 2024
What's your favourite bird?
Little Grebe © Barry Yates

By David Bentley

Volunteer, Rye Harbour Nature Reserve

It's impossible to choose a favourite Rye Harbour Nature Reserve bird, but it's fun to try. Today I’m considering three candidates. Tomorrow I might have three more.

Little Grebes are tiny, stumpy birds with pom-pom backsides. They're cute and coy in summer, best located by their 'trilling' call. In winter they form slightly comedic gangs, randomly sinking, then bobbing back up, as if trying to spook each other. BOO! It makes counting tricky, but great fun. A less endearing party trick is to disappear, sometimes forever, behind pencil-thin reeds. One happy day, last winter, I counted 52 Little Grebes across the nature reserve.

One of my spring highlights is the arrival of the first Yellow Wagtails. Flying over, their distinctive thin calls provide a little thrill. On the ground, the joy and intensity of the male birds' yellowness is undiluted. Like concentrated sunlight passed through a neon-yellow filter, turned up to 'maximum'. Sadly, I don't think they've nested on the reserve in recent years, but I see them leaving ditches around Castle Water, beaks stuffed with insects - still calling - heading across the A259 to Rye Marsh where a few gorgeous pairs still breed.

Yellow Wagtail © Derek Middleton
Yellow Wagtail © Derek Middleton

In autumn Brent Geese surge west along the Channel, heading for estuaries in West Sussex and Hampshire, where they will overwinter. Increasingly they are intercepted by the newly re-created saltmarsh opposite the Discovery Centre where they choose to linger and graze. They can be surprisingly hard to spot, but you'll find them and see that our smallest, darkest goose is also our smartest. In my eyes at least.

Brent Geese
Brent Geese © Alan Price, Gatehouse Studio

Favourite bird, then? When push comes to shove, Little Grebes win, by a very small margin.

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