Bar-tailed Godwit
Irish Name: | Guilbneach stríocearrach |
Scientific name: | Limosa lapponica |
Bird Family: | Waders |
red
Conservation status
Conservation status
Status
Winter visitor to coastal estuaries from October to April from Russia and Scandinavia.
Identification
At first glance resembles a smaller version of a Curlew - similar shape (long legs and neck) and plumage (grey/brown with streaking). The long, straight and slightly upturned bill, however is quite different. Summer plumaged birds occur sometimes, showing varying amounts of orange/brick red on the body feathers. Bar-tailed can easily be confused with the slightly longer-legged and more elegant Black-tailed Godwit, however in flight, Bar-tailed always shows fairly uniform, grey brown upperwings, a long white rump and a finely barred tail (Black-tailed is strongly patterned with black and white wings and tail and a square white rump). Usually seen feeding along outer shoreline of estuaries. Sometimes in large flocks.
Voice
Harsh/nasal two note 'cewee-cewee'
Diet
Feed along the tidal edge, or in shallow water (up to 15 cm depth). They usually commence feeding on an ebbing tide, and feed continuously for up to 6 hours. Polychaete worms, particularly lugworms, form a large proportion of their diet. On the muddier estuaries, where lugworms may be absent, they take ragworms and bivalves.
Breeding
Breeds in northern Norway, Finland and further to the north and east.
Wintering
Wintering distribution entirely coastal. They are largely confined to estuaries, with largest numbers recorded on sandy estuaries. Small numbers recorded using non-estuarine coastline.
Monitored by
Blog posts about this bird
Starting 2020 with a (literal) BANG!! Catching and colour-ringing waders in Dublin Bay
In January 2020, the Dublin Bay Birds Project Team put in a huge effort to fit colour-rings (safely, and under license) to the legs of a portion of the wintering waders in Dublin Bay. Over four days and nights, we caught and ringed 235 waders of 6 species, with 23 ‘re-trapped’ birds, two of which were Icelandic-ringed Oystercatchers! The precise tally is 199 Oystercatchers, 23 Black-tailed Godwits, 5 Redshank, 4 Dunlin, 3 Curlew, and 1 Knot.
We used a highly specialised technique called ‘cannon-netting’ (firing a large net outwards using weighted projectiles propelled from cannons) to capture the birds. To do this, we once again drafted in the skills of licensed cannon-netters from the Highland and Grampian Ringing Groups in Scotland. The catching effort involved pre-dawn starts, night-time mist-netting, hole-digging, hiding in saltmarsh and marram grass, tide-watching, precision placement of cannons and nets, lots of waiting and hoping, and running at speed to the net when it fired over a flock of birds!
Once the birds are captured and safely removed from the net they are kept calm until they are ‘processed’. This means swiftly and carefully recording some biometric measurements, like wing length, bill length, and assessing the birds age from plumage characteristics, and each bird is fitted with colour-rings. The DBBP uses a combination of carefully planned colours on each bird, including one ring that is inscribed with a unique, two-digit alphanumeric code (see photo of colour-ringed Oystercatcher).
Essentially, the fitting of colour-rings to the legs of these wintering waders in Dublin and the subsequent reading and reporting of them (and similarly the fitting of small GPS-devices to birds) is all about trying to understand where they go for roosting and foraging at a local level, and about their migratory and breeding movements at international, flyway level. In this case, the colour-ring observations provide information about what areas of Dublin Bay the waders use during different tidal states and if they appear to be particularly reliant or show fidelity to certain areas, all helping to identify and thus conserve important areas. Colour-ringing can also generate valuable information about the timing of migratory arrivals and departures, and confirm migratory links between Ireland and breeding grounds elsewhere. The map with green red and yellow dots shows the locations of international resightings of waders colour-ringed in Dublin. Colour-ringing work is something that the Dublin Bay Birds Project, supported by Dublin Port Company, has been carrying out over the last few years (see other escapades here! dublinbaybirds.blogspot.com) with constant management of a database now containing in excess of 4,500 ‘resightings’ (observations) of individually colour-marked birds at various locations, yielding some fascinating information, see HERE for an example.
Bolstering this, detailed data was generated in 2016 when we fitted a selection of waders (Redshank, Curlew and Oystercatcher) with small GPS tracking devices (in addition to colour-rings) that provided un-biased daily data about the location of the individual birds, across entire tidal cycles, both day and night. The map shows the downloaded tracks (red dots) of a Curlew in the winter of 2016/17 at Bull Island and the Tolka Estuary. This GPS-tracking work was co-funded by SEAI and Dublin Port Company.
Now the work is to go out and look for all of these colour-ringed birds, read those inscriptions and submit them to us!
Submit your resightings HERE!
The Dublin Bay Birds Project is very lucky to be supported by Dublin Port Company who keenly recognise the value of this work and the data it generates.
This work was carried out under license from the National Parks and Wildlife Service and the British Trust for Ornithology.