Half-million bird day, if you trust my counting 
Saturday had been pretty good on the local patch, a flock of
45 Hawfinches hinting at migration underway, bits and bobs to keep me happy, but the word was out that things were happening on the coast, birds on the move. I'd got a call talking of 'clouds of birds'. I'd already planned a visit there for today, but I really did fancy some of those clouds ...
And clouds indeed there were! Birds, birds, birds! I'd got to Ventes Ragas, a premier migration hotspot, at dawn and thought I'd at least have time for coffee, but barely had I poured it and I'd already notched up three species of raptor -
Sparrowhawk, Peregrine and a
White-tailed Eagle! Nice start, but they were the mere padding to the spectacle that was really unfolding - a simple glance up and it was immediately clear that this was going to be one unforgettable day, masses and masses of birds were streaming over, thousands upon thousands filling the skies, the flocks all being concentrated by the lie of the land. Standing in awe for a few moments, I realised that this, along with the day before, was probably the peak movement, a mass push of birds that can number into the millions of birds in just a few days.
At that early hour, just after 7.00 a.m., the vast bulk of birds were
Chaffinches, so that's where I started! After a few practise counts, I then did two ten-minute counts, extrapolating up to estimates for the hour. As numbers overhead either increased or decreased, tallies were recalculated, but throughout, the figures were absolutely mind-blowing, totalling an approximate 120,000 per hour from dawn till about 9.30 a.m., thereafter slowly dropping off towards mid-morning. Absolutely staggering,
380,000 Chaffinches by the morning's end!!! Even allowing for major inaccuracies that could have slipped in, the spectacle was most impressive. In amongst their midst, hundreds of
Bramblings per hour, many dozens of
Serins and plenty of 'added extras' - ranging from the expected
Skylarks and occasional
Woodlarks to the downright ludicrous, not least, right in amongst the
Chaffinch flocks, at least
25 Nutcrackers, one
Black Woodpecker and, almost funny, 12
Black-throated Divers, all in summer plumage. Over and above then, in periodic flocks many dozens strong,
Wood Pigeons and
Starlings added to the whole atmosphere of the dayssbills, while attracted by the feast that awaited them, a constant swirl of ten to fifteen
Sparrowhawks harried the many migrants, even trying to down a
Nutcracker on one occasion.
At the absolute peak of the movement, it was just incredible. Standing on the tip of the peninsula, I found myself ducking several times as birds came hurtling in, veering to avoid me only at the last moment. Which way to look? At the
Nutcracker squawking from the bush above your head? At the
White Stork that had managed to snatch a
Great Tit from the sky as it'd flown past the previous day? At the swirling flocks of
Starlings in the hope of a
Rose-coloured Starling? Or simply at the sheer movement as a whole?
And if all those birds weren't enough, there was also another layer of birds - those moving through the bushes!!! And jeepers, these were even harder to count!
Great Tits,
Blue Tits, Long-tailed Tits, Goldcrests, all on the move, all streaming south. Again, probably not exactly accurate, but counts put the tallies at 16,000
Great Tits per hour, 750
Blue Tits per hour and both
Long-tailed Tits and
Goldcrests in their hundreds, but not counted to arrive at any meaningful totals. Morning totals sat at approximately
64,000 Great Tits and 3000 Blue Tits!!! Add to them, thrushes, a
Common Redstart and a good offering of other species and you'd think it couldn't have got any better ...but there was one more bird that needs a special little mention! About an hour into the morning's entertainment, my phone went, a fellow birder also on the headland announcing
'we've got a Geltonbruve pecialinda'. Oo, says I, knowing that to be a
Yellow-browed Warbler, where?
'In the box' comes the answer! Er? Then it clicked, the ringers had caught it, so a two minute trot back and there it was, a little treat amongst the far bigger treat unfolding all around.
What a good morning it had been! But I also wished for a good afternoon, so as midday approached and the migration finally began to ebb, bar
Bramblings which seemed to be increasing, I decided to potter off for the next segment of my very successful day. At the nearby Kintai fishpools, two
Black-winged Stilts had been found a week earlier, only the second ever for Lithuania (as the first were not submitted, these take the official title of 'first for the country'). Though common as dirt across much of the world, a
Black-winged Stilt is always a most stunning of birds, so despite having seen many thousands the previous month, I was naturally very pleased to hear they were still present. Half an hour later, after being temporarily waylaid by a flock of some 600
Bramblings in a field, I was standing enjoying this pair of birds, both first year birds and as smart as any stit ever is. Eight or ten
White-tailed Eagles lazily sat about or flopped across the sky, a
Rough-legged Buzzard hovered in nearby meadows.
So that was that, all in all, a pretty good day in Lithuania!
Chaffinches and
Great Tits alone totalled 445,000 birds, plus or minus, chuck in all the rest and it all equals one heck of a lot of birds, vis mig at its best!!!
More photographs to follow, but one for now...
