Collared Pratincole

Sept 1 2016. Lake Sorbulaq, Kazakhstan. To put this Bird of the Day into perspective I’ll explain that this is the first chapter of some sort of account of my first two weeks of September 2016 in Kazakhstan. I was there with four other Canadians to work with Kazakh and Russian ornithologists monitoring and studying fall migration.

Summed up in a few dozen words like that may make light of the intensity and complexity of travelling to another continent where the scenery, culture and food were all new and the language and alphabet at times impenetrable. It is a vast, often forbidding, landscape dotted occasionally with the decaying remains of Soviet infrastructure. The landscape often defied my photography skill: on one hand the distant wall of the snow-capped Tien Shan Mountains and on the other, the oh-so-dry expanse of steppe that stretches far to the north beyond the faintest hint of mountain tops.

The Collared Pratincole was spotted towards the end of a tiring day spent exploring a number of drying lakes that offer precious relief from the flat and scorching steppe that makes up much of Kazakhstan. It would be easy to view the steppe in its endlessness as expendable; indeed the Soviet leadership of the 1950s certainly saw it that way because they assigned 37 million acres near Semipalatinsk  in the north-east of the Kazakhstan for forty years of nuclear weapons testing. Today, totally independent of Moscow, Kazakhstan has custody of an exhausted and indefinitely poisoned corner of its country; some legacy.

But back to the Bird of the Day, pratincoles are a small family of rather streamlined, insectivorous shorebirds, usually gently beige-ish about the body with striking Cleopatra-esque eye make-up. Among shorebirds they tend to be more sophisticated than cute; and they have that funny name, pratincole, which, to me anyway, suggests some kind of complex lineage. But out of all the sensations this day, I think the special appeal of a pratincole lies in the near impossibility of ever seeing one, or at least that’s how it seemed to a boy growing up and gazing at bird books in post-war England.  Yet here was one right in front of me, a Collared Pratincole, in profile just as the books had shown it, fulfillment of the near impossible and Bird of the Day. (Actually a juvenile. Ed.)

The pratincole was just one of an almost impossible list of new and nearly new birds: We started the day watching an furious stampede of Black Kites streaming westward in circling boils a thousand or so feet overhead; Northern Lapwings, Common Stints, Black-tailed Godwits and Black-winged Stilts probing muddy flats; Green Sandpipers, Wood Sandpipers and Curlew Sandpipers; Common and Ruddy Shelducks; And more Red-necked Phalaropes than I could count. Other “I never ever thought I’d see one’ sights were a Hobby, a small, scythe-shaped falcon, a nervous raft of Dalmatian Pelicans and glistening European Rollers spaced along road-side utility lines.

This young Turkestan Shrike must have felt like a bit of a celebrity; it allowed us to pile out of our mini-bus and grab a few decent shots. And it’s a shrike, always a minor sensation just like the Loggerhead and Gray Shrikes of North America and the Mackinnon’s Fiscals of Uganda.

This crowded, hot, dusty and bird-filled day was just a warm-up. It was the precursor to an overnight train ride westward to follow the legendary Silk Road to Chokpak Pass. More to come.