When the tide is out on my Somerset coastal patch, there’s so much mud it looks as if you could walk all the way across the bay to Wales.
That seemed apt when I came across a flock of black-tailed godwits, whose scientific name, Limosa limosa, literally means “muddy muddy”. The name seems inappropriate for such an elegant bird, although their long legs do allow them to feed in the muddiest places.
Our second-largest wader after the curlew, they sport a long, straight bill and chestnut-red breeding plumage, fading to grey-brown in winter. In flight, they reveal a striking black-and-white wing pattern, marking them out from the mottled brown wings of their smaller relative, the bar-tailed godwit.
Here in Somerset, we mostly see black-tailed godwits as they pass through in spring and autumn, on the coast and inland. They don’t travel as far as their globetrotting relatives, overwintering mainly in Ireland and France, and breeding farther north and east. Our birds are mainly of the Icelandic race – a deeper, more reddish shade than their continental cousins.
Like all the world’s godwits and curlews, black-tailed godwit numbers are in steep decline, because of habitat loss and intensive farming. BirdLife International now classifies the species as “near threatened” – so the small UK breeding population, mainly in East Anglia, needs all the help it can get.
