Exotica from Holland
IT WAS GOOD TO SEE a Bluethroat in my sitting room the other day. Admittedly it appeared in the Scottish News bulletin on television under the name of a blue robin. It was an excellent record for Scotland but I am sure it has been here before, albeit unnoticed. The correct name is Bluethroat or Luscinia svecica (which means the nightingale of Sweden; the true nightingale is L. megarhyncos: The nightingale with the big bill).
In breeding plumage this little bird is a very attractive creature closely resembling a Robin but with a royal blue gorget above a narrow band of scarlet separating its blue throat and white breast. Bluethroats occur throughout much of Eurasia, breeding as far north as Arctic Norway and Finland before retreating to Spain and sub-Saharan Africa for the winter. The species occurs in two forms. In one of the two forms there is a white spot in the blue throat and in the other the spot is scarlet.
I first saw this species in the Himalaya in 1992 and was enchanted by it. The only other time I have seen it in the flesh was in Holland in 2002. In behaviour it is remarkably like our familiar robin. |
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When I was in the Oostvardersplassen, a wonderful bird reserve in the new polders of Holland near Lelystad, I knew that Bluethroats had been sighted there. I said to my wife as we walked on a path to a hide among tall Phragmites: “Look carefully at every Robin you see here, one of them might be a Bluethroat.” Almost as I spoke a Robin flew onto the path ahead of us with his back to us. Then he turned to look at us showing the magnificence of his ultramarine gorget. Then the bird flew up into a willow and sang his Robin-like mimetic song. A truly lovely sight.
The Oostvardersplassen is one of my favourite places in the flat, wet, bird-rich Netherlands. From 1985 to 87 we lived in Amstelveen a suburb of Amsterdam. Whenever we could we would escape the city and explore the Ijsselmeer or the Wadden Islands off the north coast. These areas are incredible for their variety and numbers of birds especially wetland species. Here we saw Spoonbills, Storks, Godwits, Avocets, Phalaropes and innumerable geese and duck species.
So just before Christmas we headed off to answer repeated invitations to look up old friends in Holland. Our journey took us round the western rim of the Ijsselmeer to Hoorn from where members of the Dutch East Indies Company sailed the world and took the name of their home port to the cape at the southern tip of S. America.
In Hoorn we admired the exquisite architecture of Holland’s Golden Age and shuddered at the neo-brutalism of the current building styles. In the Tay Valley we think we have many geese in winter but they are as nothing to the numbers of Greylay, Whitefront and Barnacle Geese on the polders. I searched for a Bean Goose (which I have yet to spot for my World List) and had a disjointed conversation with a Dutch ornithologist (with whom I shared more enthusiasm than language): he told me that the Beans would not be here till February. Then, in compensation, I achieved another new species when I spotted a diminutive Lesser White-fronted Goose among a gaggle of much larger Greylag.
We ate smoked eel in the street before a long reflective dinner with old friends in Hoorn. Then we crossed the immense dijk that divides the Ijsselmeer to reach Lelystad made hideous by mush-rooming modern building. There we were once again in the Oostvardersplassen. Around the lakes here there are wildfowl in such profusion that one despairs of birdwatching in Britain, almost even in Tayside. Another watcher told us he had seen Bearded Tit, Kingfisher and White-tailed Eagle a few minutes before. A Waxwing perched on crab apple covered in shrivelling yellow fruit. There were Pochard, Goldeneye, Shelduck and Shoveler by the thousand.
A long search turned up a single Pintail (a Pijlstart, or arrow-tail, the Dutch call them) and a group of Smew. I focussed the telescope for my wife onto a handsome male Nonnetje (‘little nun’, because of his white habit-like plumage) and stood back to let her use the ‘scope. In that brief moment I saw him; a bird I have heard many time but never seen despite years of searching. The Bittern flew out of a clump of Phragmites into another a few yards away and disappeared as invisibly as, a fraction of a second before, he had erupted from the impenetrable reed bed. I doubt if I shall ever see one again.
© Robin Hull
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