Pied avocets in flight at the Perumbakkam wetland on March 15, 2024. | Photo Credit: PRINCE FREDERICK
There are attention-grabbing beaks and then some. Where two avian species are spitting images of each other and telling them apart is a challenge akin to identifying identical twins, the beak sometimes comes into play. The colour, the thickness and the base of the beak help settle the matter. In these cases, the beaks are markedly different, and not dramatically. This scenario often plays out in the identification of warblers during winter.
Sometimes, the beak is so unique and one does not have to study any other diagnostic feature — just a hazy outline of the beak can have the rest of the bird identified from a mile away. The pied avocet is an apt illustration. Though its upturned beak is undoubtedly its most striking feature (downside-up and as thin as the lines in an engineering drawing), the pied avocet sports a whole bunch of other features that enable it to be identified with one eye fully- and the other half-closed. This bird can be easily GISS-ed (GISS is identification by General Impression of Size and Shape). At the time of this article being published, the possibility of the pied avocet being GISS-ed at Perumbakkam was high.
For days now, a flock of pied avocets have been foraging for food at the Perumbakkam wetland, often in the company of black-winged stilts. Anyone who knows the species is “engineered” to show up at the wetland around this time of the year, its presence should now register from a mile away, with one-and-a-half eyes closed and absolutely no assistance from a pair of binoculars to that half-open eye. Kumaresan Chandrabose has been expecting the species at the wetland, and on the days he visited it expecting to find a flock of them, he could see it from not one, but two miles away. Their numbers were good. Kumaresan’s eBird records on March 11 and 13 under Pallikaranai marsh (as Perumbakkam wetland is an organic part of it) mention 24 and 28 pied avocets respectively.
In the early part of the winter-migratory season, Kumaresan was among those who reported a massive flock of pied avocets at the salt pans on Nemmeli-Thiruporur Road. His eBird record for under Nemmeli for September 29 read “450 pied avocets”.
The pied avocet is a bird of coastal wetlands, and it cannot but ink in Perumbakkam wetland in its winter itinerary. A fag-ender species, it puts in an appearance at the Perumbakkam wetland when the waters have dipped remarkably and there are enough shallows to settle on.
This time around, the dipping was swifter than before and there was a disconcerting thought that the process might not match the pied avocet’s regular timing. That it might be too quick for the bird. The last few days have proved the thinking pleasantly erroneous. In fact, the pied avocents sojourn at the Perumbakkam wetland is turning out to quite a long one.
And then they show up at Perumbakkam wetland too, honouring an annual commitment.
