Aden: Waders on Salt Pans Spring 1946

Life list now 206 species

>>Overall picture
My previous posts about the Salt Pans have been mainly concerned with discoveries of new species of wader (shore birds). However, I was interested in more than this. Because there was no book on the birds of Aden, I wanted to discover what should be in such a book. I needed to unravel the status in the colony of each species of bird. Was it a resident or a seasonal visitor? If the latter, what were the seasons? Was it common or rare?  Did it breed there?

My first season was the Spring of 1946, March to June, and I was able to collect enough information during that period to begin to see some answers, especially regarding waders, my speciality. I knew that most of them bred during the summer in northern Europe and Asia, migrated south in the autumn to their winter quarters and returned via a northerly migration the following spring. Consequently I expected that the waders on the Salt Pans in March would have wintered there, or be passage migrants on their way north, and that the numbers would decline at some point. After each visit I kept a log of the number of each species seen and hoped that the fluctuations of such numbers would indicate what was going on.

Nowadays I would monitor these numbers on a computer. But, in those days, computing facilities were very primitive. In fact, the slide rule (which I still have) was my only computing equipment in Aden, left over from my aborted Engineering course at University College Nottingham. It was highly portable and required no battery but also had no apps! Its main use for birding came from the millimetre scale down one side with which I could take measurements of specimens. So I had to use my head as the computer and build up intuitive ideas of status. 

 

Fortunately the numbers are in my old notebooks and I have entered them into spreadsheets from which I have been able to produce summaries. These give a more accurate picture than the vague ideas that were forming in my mind at the time.
Here is a chart showing what I found about the Spring of 1946. The bars give the average number of waders per visit during each month. The blue bars are the number of species and the red bars the number of individual birds. Both reached a peak in April and declined to June. This information indicated that there would be interesting questions for the months to come: How much wintering of waders? How to interpret the relatively large numbers into June? Which species are passage migrants only? Does this pattern repeat in 1947? What can be found out about the timing of each species of wader? Some of the answers will be contained  in future posts.>>>

Fresh species of wader

The Wood Sandpiper Tringa glareola, seen on 10 June 1946 on the Salt Pans, was a species not mentioned by the previous authors so my record was the first for Aden and the sixth species that I added to the Aden list. Most of my additions to the Aden list to this point had been waders: out of 22 species of wader so far identified by me in Aden, five were new. Names of additions to the Aden avifauna are on a gold background.

Here is my description of the Wood Sandpiper, a species I already knew from England: "I was first attracted by its much smaller size than the other waders (it was with the Greenshank and Redshanks at the north end of the bank but in the water) and I first took it to be a Curlew Sandpiper. This impression was accentuated by its comparatively dark appearance but, as I approached, I saw this was caused by a heavily spotted breast rather than the brownish-chestnut of the other species. I also saw that the bill was straight and relatively shirt and slender. I put it to flight and several times it uttered a shrill 'cheef-cheef-cheef'. The white rump and upper tail were noticeable as was the dark barring at the end of these feathers. In flight the under wing seemed, while not very dark, not noticeably light. However, I only had a brief glimpse of this. I was unable to see the length of the legs as the bird stood in the water but, in flight, they seemed to extend slightly beyond the tail. The bird was definitely not a Marsh Sandpiper as it was (a) too dark, (b) not anything like as tall as a Redshank, (c) with too short a bill."  

Two species, Oystercatcher and ___________, were mentioned frequently by the other authors as occurring in Aden. I knew the Oystercatcher Haematopus ostralegus well in England so identified it straight away, but the _________________________*  was new to me and caused me much puzzlement. The only one observed during Spring 1946 was on 24 May on the Salt Pans.

"When first noticed it, it was standing on a small island of mud in a shallow but wide (12'-15') dyke (water channel). As I approached it quickly crossed the dyke by wading and swimming and mounted the opposite bank. Its left wing being broken, I was able to catch it while it ran across an area of dried mud since it stumbled a good deal. Because of its injured wing, I killed it and brought it back to Steamer Point. The only note heard was a rather melodious croak uttered once when first disturbed and several times when in the hand. The bill was about half closed when I heard the note. It tried to, and indeed did bite me but to no unpleasant effect."

I was very intrigued by the appearance of this bird and made extensive notes when I had it in the hand so as to be sure to be able to identify it later. I will not give them all here but include the following life size sketch of the bill.
Regarding the plumage, I wrote: "Whole head, neck, underparts, tail, thigh feathers, underwing coverts, upper tail coverts, rump and scapulars pure white. Patch of black covering whole mantle and long feathers extending down centre of back to rump, obscuring actual white back The sketch below gives a rough idea of the extent of the patch. Browner tinge towards rear. White feathers beneath black outside double shaded area."

I retained two long mantle feathers and one first primary feather. Their images are shown below.

QUIZ: If you think you know what species this bird was, please put its name, your name, how you identified it and the date (24 May 1946) in the comment box at the end of this post.