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Lone Wanderer: Nordmann’s Greenshank at Cairns, Far North Queensland
How I learned to stop worrying and love waders
On New Year’s Day, my friend Andrew sent a text message alerting me to the rare bird that had turned up at the Esplanade in Cairns. It was a Nordmann’s greenshank (Tringa guttifer), a northern hemisphere wader, which had overshot its wintering grounds and ended up south of the equator.
Absolute mega, Andrew told me.
I had never considered myself a twitcher, but this was a bird I wanted to see. It was too late to catch the tide that afternoon, so I arranged with my birding buddy Jen to head down to the coast the next morning. If I had calculated the tides correctly, we would get there just as the waves were shepherding the waders off the mud and onto the sand. We could see the greenshank and be back up the mountain before the afternoon thunderstorms rolled in.
Nordmann’s greenshank is a vanishingly rare visitor to Australia. It is not much more abundant in its breeding grounds on the Sea of Okhotsk in the Russian Far East, where the population is thought to be around 1,000. In the northern winter, the birds fly south to Vietnam and Indonesia, stopping on the mudflats in Japan, Korea and China en route. The species is endangered, its survival threatened by land reclamation in the staging and wintering…
