Kakadu Beach bird roost 13 April 2025

Photo courtesy of Win Bartholomai

ASE (with green leg flag) our champion flyer who was banded in 2013 and would have flown to Alaska at least 12 times. This conservatively is about 13,500 km one way, meaning that ASE has flown at least 324,000 km during her life. From Earth to the Moon is 384,000 km, so ASE weighing about 350 gm, has probably flown this distance if we allow for storms and winds pushing her off course. If she was banded as an adult then it is likely ASE has already reached this target.

Kakadu Beach roost was strangely quiet this morning after all the crowded excitement of the summer season.  The majority of our godwits, knots, curlews and sand-plovers are gone for the winter, travelling far to the north to disperse to their spring breeding grounds in Siberia, Alaska and beyond the Arctic Circle.  By now they are probably crossing the Equator, heading out over the Philippine Sea and up towards China and the Yellow Sea between Korea and China.  It seems that they tend to stop en route to feed and keep their body fat weight up, unlike the return nonstop flight back across the Pacific (for our godwits at least!).  I had time this morning to muse on whether these birds are able to remember previous flights and talk among each other about what drives them to make this incredible and dangerous journey every year.  What is the instinct that finally says to them… its time to go?  And they lift off, and instead of making a short flight across to Toorbul or the mudflats up the Pumicestone Passage, this time its for real and they turn north along the great expanse of the Queensland to foreign shores and the uncertainties of the breeding season.  I wonder if ASE will make it back again for a 16th time? 

There were still a few birds on the roost – 3 Far Eastern Curlew looking as if they had missed the train, a lone Eurasian Whimbrel and our resident birds, 64 Pied Stilts in their gleaming white and navy blue plumage and long red legs, a single Beach Stone-curlew almost smiling smugly at the quietness of the roost at last, and four spunky and adorable little Red-capped Plovers.  However I think I spotted about 20 Bar-tailed Godwits over at Toorbul so not everything has left.

Getting the seaward warning signs back up on the water’s edge is critically important before people think it is OK to come and use the beach.  For birds, Kakadu Beach is like an aerodrome and possibly clearly identified in their memories as a safe place to stop over.  If we can preserve this little stretch of beach as human populations impact, then it will mean there is a safe place for the flocks when they return at the end of our winter. And this year, avian flu pathogens are devastating northern populations and we just have to hope that our shorebird long-distance flyers don’t catch it from mixing with local populations as they get ready to breed and then on the return flight.

It would be so useful to have a discussion about the roost in this quiet time to see how we can make it more useful for the public and safer for the birds. Just as the birds are recognising KBBR is a safe place to roost, so international birdwatchers are making the journey to see one of the great avian spectacles on the east coast.

I will still be counting at high tides through the winter because the empty time-spaces are important to record on a long-term scientific understanding of how climate change or weather events or human interference can change the dynamics very quickly.