THOMPSON BEACH TURF WAR!

I had not been out to Thompson Beach in quite a while. I was missing the solitude of the place and decided to head out for high tide and capitalise on a break in the gloomy pall winter had cast. The sun was rising as I left home and it looked promising. My good mood got a severe shake around the throat when upon arriving at the Central Beach parking area I found a giant lummox and his angry dog staring down at me from the beach. Not just a casual, "who the hell is pulling up here this early on a Sunday?" kind of look, he was staring intently, waiting to engage me....I could feel it. I have parked in the same spot many times before, birders are not exactly out of place here, there's info boards and trails everywhere, but he would not look away. Something seemed wrong, his face was contorting...pig-like, horse-like. Bloody hell....

I always feel a bit vulnerable venturing off into sparsely populated spots with a few thousand dollars worth of kit in the car or hanging around my neck in a bag. Like running through a lions enclosure with a rib-eye steak around your neck.....asking for it, really. I feel especially vulnerable in parts of the country where 'blokier' blokes are engaged in more typically blokey pursuits, like shooting shit, catching shit, driving shit really fast and loud or just making a mess of shit.

I look up, the wind must have changed direction, because now his face is stuck....arse-like. I get out of the car thinking, 'what the hell could it be?'  Driving a Volvo wagon is certainly another mark against me....and wearing goofy gumboots. Oh, and equally goofy, ill-fitting hat....

Could have been any number of things he didn't like about me but he was coming over to tell me, right now!

"Shouldn' park there...locals get pissed-off with ya parkin' there! Should move ya car....move ya car over, they launch boats there!" 

Being a hot-tempered alpha-male, hooked on adrenalin and bent on beach domination myself (albeit whilst driving a silver Volvo and being worried about getting damp feet...) I took him on....

"....uh, but....but...I though they launch boats on the southern end....uh, isn't that the boat ramp?"

Unimpressed with my feeble attempt to drum on my own chest, he amped up....

"Yeah it is (long pause)....but locals launch here... (synapses now barely firing) ...Locals get pissed-off....pull in here..."

He now demonstrates for me by way of motioning with his very long arms and ground-scraping hands that I should move the car - a metre to the left.

Worried about him having an apoplexy upon me asking another question of him, or setting his equally dim-witted looking dog on me, I relent and moved the Volvo - one metre. He has worked hard to communicate his concern with me, he walks off....exhausted. But not too exhausted to leave without firing one last salvo,

"You won't see much out there anyway....wrong season, birds not back 'til end of the year!"

Hmmmmm. Well at least he has read the migratory wader information board....or had it read to him.

I walk off, head full of scathing insults (all of which had the good sense not to leave my lips) and more than a little peeved. Not about to let a shaved ape lecture me on how to party down with the waders.....

Anyway, I was there for birding. On my last visit I managed to muster 43 birds on my list, a personal record for this particular site. I was now curious to see if an early arriving migrants had sneaked back form the northern hemisphere. As I walk off, I wonder what my Lummox friend would make of thousands of 'illegal' aliens from the northern hemisphere alighting on his beach every year, eating up resources, lazing on the shore....all without going through the proper channels. I'm sure he has opinions on that too.

Well, the morning kicked off with some stonking views of one of my favourite little tourists, the Double-banded Plover. Taking a well earned break from the frostier climes of New Zealand and still wearing their best breeding outfits to boot.

Double-banded Plover Charadrius bicinctus

...taking a very well earned nap.

Hard to believe that these diminutive and graceful little birds fly well over 2000 kilometres at the end of their breeding season to avoid the icy New Zealand winter (as well as the terrible accent and poor television) only to repeat the journey 6 or 7 months later in the same year. Equally as hard to believe is that they eat up to 1000 times their body weight each day of a rare type of rock only found on the shoreline of south-eastern Australia**

Yes, hard to believe...

It was hard to draw myself away,  the more closely I scanned the pebbles on the shore, the more of them I continued to find. I counted 11 in total on the central beach area. As I scanned northwards along the central beach I also caught views of Pied Oystercatchers, a couple of Ruddy Turnstones and a small gang of Red Knot. On the claypans to the north there were good numbers of Grey Plovers, looking decidedly 'slimmer' than those I saw in late March/April before they departed for the northern hemisphere. One or two had over-wintered here, but this large group of 32 were not to be found on my last few visits.  

But the real interesting sighting of the visit was a brief 2-3 second eyeful of a Spotless Crake. An unusual sighting for this area, given the hyper-saline water of the system of small claypans and tidal channels behind the coastal dunes. But in the 2 visits prior to this one, I had been stopped in my tracks by some unusual and high-pitched, "dog-chew-toy-like" squeaks that came from a section of  heavy samphire & glasswort cover on a small tidal channel on the northern side of the beach. On the two visits prior, I had no luck seeing anything...I stood, waited...pished, waited....squeaked an Audubon's bird caller, waited. I did a lot of bloody waiting. For nothing. Well, nothing other than to have reclusive dog chew-toys squeak back at me from the impenetrable vegetation of a rank back-water. The calls would stop after a minute or two and the cover was so thick you could not see beyond the first 30 centimetres of vegetation.

 

But, today I was lucky! Upon setting up my scope and picking a site with more cover a bird took flight from just in front of me and crossed the metre-wide stretch of grimy, green water...giving me a half-decent view of what was a very small, uniformly dark or sooty bird with a pair of reddish legs dangling beneath it. It dived straight into heavy cover, not to be seen or heard again. I gathered my thoughts and then pulled out the Pizzey & Knight to confirm what I thought I had seen. Ah, yes...third time is a charm! A life tick for me and new record for the site too. I finished off with a peek around the other side of the dune set to see if the Spotted Crakes were still putting on a show - sure enough, they were...well, at least one of them. I had to almost kick my way through Black-tailed Native Hens to get over the dune.

Black-tailed Native Hen Tribonyx ventralis

 

I walked slowly back to the car, realising I had whiled away a couple of hours and counted up my list. A new personal record for Thompson Beach  - an even 50 species for the day.

..and a big, sloppy "Pfffffffthhhhttttt!" to the nay-saying simian who bet I'd see diddley squat!

** a bigger, sloppier "Pfffffffthhhhttttt!" to anyone who scrolled down here with an eyebrow half-cocked, looking for an explanation of Double-banded Plover eating habits - everyone knows they prefer chips.