Chichester Harbour Trip Report, Guided Birdwatching 16th Nov 2019

I had planned a shorter guided outing to Nutbourne Channel, Chichester Harbour, although it ended up being not so short! This is an area where you can often get closer to wetland bird species than at most locations. There had been a lot of rain recently, fortunately this trip was on a wonderful winters day, bright and crisp.

The stream that flows into Nutbourne Channel had burst its diminutive banks. This created a wet habitat that had attracted many moorhens and a nice selection of teal. The hedges in this area were alive with house sparrows, more than I had seen for quite some time. From the reedbed around the stream a water rail squealed its typical cry.

As we walked towards the harbour a flock of several hundred brent geese were feeding on the farmland to our left. Due to the contour of the land we initially became aware of a number of goose heads poking up over the top of the mini-horizon. Their chatter was clear to hear and the sound accompanied us over most of the walk.

Part of the Brent Goose flock.

Once at the harbour wall we were greeted by an array of ducks and wading birds. The teal appeared to all be on the flooded steam area mentioned previously but there was a large number of wigeon in the harbour along with a smattering of handsome pintail. A previously invisible common snipe decided to vacate the area and called as it appeared to rocket off the intertidal mud, twisting from side to side every few wing beats as they tend to do. Other waders present were happily feeding and roosting around the edge of the tide.

One species of wader was further up the slopes of the mud and rooting around in the stranded seaweed, these being turnstones. I always find them most enjoyable to watch as they use their heads to bulldoze the weed out of the way revealing tasty morsels underneath. The feathers on the upper-side of turnstones give them great camouflage around the strand line, and as we watched them more and more started to appear in our vision and the resultant image was that of writhing piles of seaweed.

Turnstone.

There were three or four rock pipits around the rocks at the top of the harbour. One of these was ringed, with a metal ring on the left leg and a coloured ring on the right leg. This ringed bird was most confiding and approached close enough for me to read the numbers on the coloured ring! I submitted the ring data later on and found out that the bird was ringed on 31 August 2018 at Makkevika in Norway. It was seen at Broadmarsh, Hampshire, in February this year, with that being the only previous sighting since being ringed. I looked up Makkevika and it appears to be a bit over 1300 km away from Chichester Harbour! It was a male bird and hatched out in 2018, pictured below.

Well travelled Rock Pipit. 

The farmland near the harbour appeared pretty desolate and I remarked as such. I was soon to be proven wrong as a tight flock of around 30 skylarks swooped low over the field. This was not typical skylark behaviour, as they generally don’t form tight flocks nor stick to flying very low over the ground!

As the tide rose red-breasted mergansers and great crested grebes started to arrive, with most individuals from both species still in a stage of moulting. The number of wigeon roosting on the rising tide increased. A red-breasted merganser swam into the centre of the wigeon flock and proceeded to fall asleep.

Great Crested Grebe.

Later on I was scanning over the water and came across a diving duck in the distance, it turned out to be a long-tailed duck. This was quite a surprise! It is not often you see them inside the harbours around here so it was a real treat. On top of that, this individual was being obliging and sat on the surface for a decent amount of time between dives.

We ended up watching the long-tailed duck for a good while, perhaps 25 minutes. Eventually the duck was lost from view and I tried to relocate it, this searching yielded a cream-capped marsh harrier hunting in the distance over on Thorney Island.

With that we headed back although as always it was almost inevitable that a few more interesting things were seen that we had to check out! In total we saw and heard 49 species. It was a most enjoyable morning at one of the many fantastic areas around Chichester Harbour. Photos courtesy of Les Phillips. 

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Hugh Baggaley