Here with us in Thanet for the winter is a very festive looking and beautiful bird, the European Golden Plover.
It’s a small bird with a distinctive speckled gold-and-black plumage. During their winter stay with us at Pegwell Bay and the Minster marshes their black is replaced by light brown and white.
Most of the time when you are lucky enough to see them they are in a flock, high up in our skies. They fly close together with rapid wingbeats and they twinkle in the light.
In winter they inhabit low lying farmland and coastal flats like Pegwell Bay and the Minster marshes. It’s a big space for them to stick together, moving around feeding and flocking. This hungry little high-flying bird spends about 90% of daytime feeding.
When they are in-flight they can be very fast. In fact, they are so fast they changed history, well I mean they changed one of the ways we record it! In 1951 Sir Hugh Beaver – once owner of the Guinness brewery – was out on a shooting party. Whilst trying to shoot the birds fortunately they managed to evade him. His excuse for missing the birds with his shot gun was that they were too fast.
This led him and his friends on a quest to find the fastest game bird and they noticed there were many other interesting “world records” and this quest eventually led to the creation of the first Guinness World Records book in 1954.
So, look out for these beautiful golden birds with their sharp pointy wings flocking and twinkling in the skies around Pegwell and the Minster Marsh.
By May they will be heading off to their breeding grounds of the upland moors and even further north to Iceland, Faroe Islands, or Scandinavia for the summer.
Thanet nature expert Nik Mitchell runs the Get Wild page on facebook
