August 20th, 8am. My mobile pings. There is a message from Jan, a friend who lives in Seaton, a few miles east of Looe. The message comprises a picture of five White Storks in a field, with the simple caption ‘Downderry!’. This is a village adjacent to Seaton. The previous day I had spent a couple of fruitless hours driving around country lanes looking for White Storks because a flock of 70 had been reported on the river Lynher! I message Jan and ask her to ring me if she sees them again.
These birds were known to have come from the rewilding project at Knepp in Sussex, where White Storks have been introduced, and in 2020 successfully bred in the wild in the UK for the first time in 600 years (in 1416 a pair nested on the roof of St Giles Cathedral in Edinburgh). The Knepp Estate works closely with the Cotswold Wildlife Park, which has supplied young birds to be released that have been bred from a captive population received from rehabilitation centres in Poland. The flock that has been seen in Cornwall comprises mainly young birds, with a few adults.
An hour later I am walking the dog on Looe’s Wooldown when I am startled to hear ducks quacking. It is my mobile! Jan tells me that there is a single White Stork by the pond in Seaton Country Park. An hour later I am parking my car there and make contact with Jan. Sadly there is no stork to be seen. But there are a few large white birds flying high above the pond, and I suddenly realise they are not all gulls. There are two bigger birds, with long beaks and legs.
I have seen my first White Storks in Cornwall! As I watch them and take some photos, the birds drift away slowly towards Downderry. But then I realise there are many more. I count about 70! They are swirling upwards, riding the thermals along the coast. They make no attempt to land.
We watch them for more than half an hour, as the flock continually forms and re-forms, and then begins to move westward.
I do not see a single bird on the ground. For a photo of White Storks on the ground, I have had to fall back on one I have taken of birds living in captivity at the Wildlife and Wetland Trust’s Martin Mere in Lancashire. The picture reminds us of the key features of these birds.
I phone Jon Ross, Warden on Looe Island Nature Reserve, to tell him that I think the Stork flock may soon be visible from his vantage point. Half an hour later I get a message from him to say the birds have flown directly over Looe Island, causing great excitement among the group of seal surveyors who are there for the day, along with a group of visiting Cornwall Wildlife Trust staff. White Stork is a spectacular addition to the list of birds recorded on Looe Island! The flock is observed to continue west towards St.Austell Bay. Late in the day it is reported to have landed at Predannack airfield on the Lizard. Where next!?
White Storks are of course migratory birds. Is this the beginning of a migratory journey southward to Spain and to Africa via the Straits of Gibraltar, or will the young birds return the way they have come, familiarising themselves with landmarks on their route? White Storks rely heavily on thermals to aid their flight on their long journeys, so often seek short sea crossings, rather than long flights across the sea without assistance from thermals. In the days after I saw the flock, reports begin to filter in of sightings in north Cornwall which suggest the birds are travelling back eastward. Sure enough, by the 24th August many of the birds are back in Sussex. In the days that follow there are reports of some birds crossing the Channel to France.
White Storks are omnivorous, and will eat small mammals, fish, amphibians and invertebrates. They enjoy open marshland, rivers, dykes and wet farmland, and their absence as a breeding bird for so long was due in part to the loss of many of these watery habitats. They were also affected by hunting. Big white birds were potentially easy targets for hunters.
I reflect that apart from a sighting of a single bird in Norfolk in the late 1960s, this is the first time I have seen a wild White Stork in the UK. Before re-introductions they normally visited the UK in very small numbers, averaging about 20 a year.
But I have seen them in other European countries. The largest population in Europe is in Poland, with over 50,000 breeding pairs and there are healthy populations in several other countries, including Portugal, Spain, Germany, Lithuania, Belarus, and Latvia. It is the national bird of Ukraine. Storks are much loved. They often live in close proximity to people, nesting on roofs or platforms provided for them, and have become a symbol of spring and fertility. The arrival of the Stork carrying a baby is a familiar image.
The last time I saw a wild White Stork was in 2005 in the Coto Donana National Park in SW Spain, one of the foremost nature reserves in Europe. Looking back through old photos from that visit, I found one which interestingly gave a good size comparison with a Grey Heron, and with another large white bird, the Eurasian Spoonbill. The White Stork is taller than both, usually with a standing height of 100 to 125 cm.
On July 19th my eye was caught by a headline in the Guardian – ‘RSPB celebrates return of the Spoonbill to wetland habitats’. With a surname like mine it is difficult to be indifferent to ‘Spoonies’! In Cornwall the Eurasian Spoonbill is usually categorized as a ’rare and very local winter visitor’. It is sometimes called the Common Spoonbill, but in Cornwall it is not! This is another large, long-legged, bird which was lost as a breeding species in the UK for centuries, and is now making a comeback.
The Guardian article, by Helena Horton, reported that these large white wading birds have been found this year nesting and breeding at RSPB Ouse Washes in Cambridgeshire for the first time since the seventeenth century. This follows their re-establishment as breeding birds in England at the Holkham estate in north Norfolk, Britain’s largest National Nature Reserve. In 2023 this colony produced 90 fledged birds. There are other colonies at the Fairburn Ings RSPB reserve in West Yorkshire, a former coalmining area, and at Havergate Island on the Suffolk coast (also an RSPB reserve). The lagoons at Fairburn Ings that have attracted Spoonbills were formed by subsidence in the former mine workings and flooding from the river Aire. I can remember visiting them in the 1970s but that was before the Spoonbills had arrived. There are now eight Spoonbill breeding colonies in the UK. In 2020 nearly 40 pairs bred. Winter sightings in southern England are also on the increase. Populations have been increasing in mainland Europe, notably in the Netherlands where there are over 2000 pairs. There has also been significant growth in Denmark where in 2021 there were almost 600 pairs.
In the Middle Ages Spoonbills nested widely in southern England, and the young birds especially (known as ‘branchers’) were often eaten. The last breeding birds in the East Anglian fenlands were wiped out in the 1660s, by a combination of land drainage and hunting. The draining of the Fens in the mid-seventeenth century meant the loss of an important breeding area. By the time of Thomas Bewick, the nineteenth-century artist-naturalist, they had become, in his words, ‘rare visitants’.
Some light on the fate of many visiting Spoonbills in nineteenth century Cornwall has been given by the accounts of Dr Jonathan Couch. He was born in 1789 in Polperro, and became Cornwall’s pre-eminent natural historian of any era. Couch served the people of Polperro as a surgeon apothecary for 60 years, until his death in 1870. Natural history was his consuming passion and he developed an expertise on the bird species of his native county, both through his own observations and through the specimens brought to him for examination by neighbours and patients. One of his contacts was a Looe man, Clement Jackson, a pharmacist in East Looe and an amateur taxidermist, who brought Couch many birds that he had shot in the Looe area, but also further afield in Cornwall. In those days examining a bird at close quarters in the hand was the best route to identification, and shooting them was normal practice. If the birds were good to eat, their chances of survival were reduced further.
Couch noted that in the third week of October 1843 nineteen Spoonbills were seen on the north coast near Newquay and four of them were shot. Eleven had flown over Hayle on 11 October and alighted near Gwithian where seven were shot by Richard Hocking. Couch also noted birds were shot on the Lynher in 1852 and 1858.
The Guardian story led me to wonder where I had seen my first Spoonbill. I turned to the ‘life-list’ that I still keep in my first (and now battered!) copy of Peterson’s Field Guide to the Birds of Britain and Europe. Against ‘Spoonbill’ I had written a date – 13/8/89. This meant that the location must have been the Netherlands, where we had a family holiday in 1989. But where did I see my first Spoonbill in Britain? It was probably much more recent, here in Cornwall during the last decade, on visits to the muddy estuaries of the Lynher-Tamar, when a few individual birds were present. Spoonbills sometimes roost on Beggar’s Island (commonly known as ‘Rat Island’) opposite Jupiter Point, often in company with Cormorants, Oystercatchers and other waders, and gulls. Spoonbills are mainly seen in autumn and winter in Cornwall.
Probably my most memorable sighting was on a visit to the Walmsley sanctuary, close to the Camel estuary in north Cornwall, on 24th January 2017. (This is a reserve managed by the Cornwall Bird Watching and Preservation Society, and to visit you need to be a member of the Society). The reserve has a tower hide which provides a superb overview of the wetland. My diary for that day recorded my experience in unusual detail: ‘a Spoonbill was immediately visible, a large white bird with long dark legs and the amazing bill that is much longer than the head of the bird’. Identification of Spoonbills is relatively easy because of their extraordinary bills, though at a distance these all-white birds could perhaps be confused with a Great White Egret or a swan.
The Spoonbill was feeding, wading methodically through the shallow water in one of the large pools on the far side of the sanctuary. I noted that ‘the distinctive bill was more spatula-shaped than spoon-shaped’. The bird was sweeping it carefully from side to side through the water to sieve its prey, mainly aquatic invertebrates and small fish. The bill was black, with a broad yellow fringing tip; this was an adult bird, though it lacked the drooping crest behind the head typical of full breeding plumage.
Swimming near to it was a pair of ducks also sporting extraordinary bills. These were Shovelers. The drake is especially handsome, with its dark green head and yellow eye, white breast and vivid chestnut flanks. Its huge bill is shovel-shaped and wider at the end than at the base.
At one time this bird was also sometimes called a ‘spoonbill’, until the great naturalist John Ray gave the two species separate names in the seventeenth century. I was seeing three ‘spoonbills’, until another birder in the hide pointed out a fourth partly concealed by some reeds. It strode into view and I could see from its bill colour, a dull pink, greying towards the head, that this was a juvenile.
As I watched, the two big white birds lifted into the air. Unlike herons, spoonbills fly with necks outstretched. They flew towards the hide, dropping down to feed in another shallow pool.
They took off again and headed back to the far side of the reserve. A Kingfisher appeared and perched in a small tree on one of the ridges of land that divide the pools. One of the Spoonbills foraged beneath it in unusual juxtaposition: a striking combination which underlined the large difference in size. Both birds were fishing but using rather different techniques!
Since that red-letter day, I have had several more encounters with ‘Spoonies’, though I have still not found one any closer to Looe than the river Lynher. Hopefully one day Spoonbills will appear in the Looe estuaries.
One encounter was a long way from Looe on a visit to North Lancashire and the extraordinary RSPB wetland reserve at Leighton Moss, in 2023, in late summer. A small flock of at least four birds were busy feeding in the large pools and salt marsh viewable from the reserve’s Eric Morecambe hide. These were adults and juveniles. Perhaps these were post-breeding birds visiting from Yorkshire or Norfolk?
The most recent sighting came at Walmsley in February 2024 when again there were two birds, an adult and a juvenile. They provided plenty of opportunities for photographs in the company of a range of other water birds in a very busy reserve – geese, swans, ducks, herons, egrets, grebes and waders.
The Spoonbill’s route to re-establishment as a breeding British bird has not featured such dramatic interventions as the White Stork’s, but should also be celebrated. The RSPB has played an important role in cherishing their presence at their reserves. Moreover, recent years have seen considerable growth in the numbers of many other long-legged wading birds breeding in the UK including the Common Crane, Great White Egret, Bittern, Little Egret, Cattle Egret, and most recently Glossy Ibis – assisted by climate change. This is a heartening story in a period when the depletion of the natural world in Britain so often makes the headlines.
Further reading:
R.D.Penhallurick: Jonathan Couch’s Cornish Birds, Polperro Heritage Press, 2003
Cornwall Birds (CBWPS): Annual Reports.
The Guardian: RSPB celebrates returns of the spoonbill to wetland habitats, 19/7/24
This is the seventeenth blog in an occasional series that I have written for the Looe Marine Conservation Group website, and which began in 2020. All the blogs are still accessible on the website.
Derek Spooner