Collared pratincole

This morning I decided that I was well enough to risk a day out, so I made the trip to Slimbridge that didn't happen on Monday. It turned out not to be the best day for a visit, because staff were thinning the rushes and reeds outside the Martin Smith hide, and the disturbance they were creating meant that there was barely a bird to be seen anywhere on Tack Piece, the northernmost section of the reserve. I still had a good time though, for the four hours that my energy held out, and I was pleased to get some good views of this juvenile collared pratincole, which has become one of the most famous birds in the country since it was blown into Slimbridge by a storm last Thursday.

The collared pratincole is a small wader that's native to southern Europe and North Africa. It moves south outside the breeding season and overwinters in sub-Saharan Africa, so this one has been blown a long way off course. It's about the size of a golden plover, or a little smaller than a lapwing: around ten inches long, with a twenty four inch wingspan. It was originally classified alongside swallows, martins and swifts, because it hunts insects on the wing and has short legs, long, pointed wings, a forked tail and a short bill, but the pratincoles (of which there are eight species world-wide) are now classified separately. As it zoomed back and forth over the lake on circumflex wings, with lightning changes of direction and speed, its flight pattern put me more in mind of a small tern than a hirundine, but it's genuinely distinctive, and in the end I decided that it looks more like itself than it resembles any other species I've seen.

I always feel sorry for birds in these circumstances, because you can't be optimistic that the situation will end anything other than badly for them: they can't stay here because it's too cold, and solo migration, especially over such a distance, is a desperately dangerous undertaking. Really the only solution for this little chap would be to catch a north wind and somehow attach itself to a flock of other birds that are also heading south, but at this late stage of the autumn the chances of it finding a migratory flock don't seem good. At the moment though it seems quite happy to be resting and feeding itself up at Slimbridge, where it's cutting an elegant swathe through the local wasp population.

I've put a few more photos on Twitter, if you'd like to see them.