Shorebirding in Dongtai

I have taken a page out of “Don Parmesan’s” book to describe the birding in Dongtai and i’m going to spell it out, S-H-O-R-E-B-I-R-D-S. Birds, birds, birds, birds are everywhere. Dongtai is a remnant of XiaoYangkou few years ago. XiaoYangkou is heading towards darkness as more development is planned for that area. One of my colleague who is a native of the place told me, “We gave up that place few years ago”. The older blog post explains the transformation of Yangkou. The vast majority of the interdial mudflats along the Zhejiang province has been already reclaimed, Shanghai is hell bent on following the footsteps of Zhejiang province and southern Jiangsu has lost most of its coastal mudflats too which leaves the shorebirds to Dongtai as their only resort along the coast of three provinces, which certainly explains the massive no of shorebirds congregate along this coast.

The Ride & Crashpad :

The idea behind the trip was solely on Roger’s visit to Shanghai and he wanted to explore something new and he has extensively birded XiaoYangkou when he was living in Shanghai. It was just a weekend trip with a hit and run mode but our plan went south when a smartypants blocked our car in the parking lot which cost us half a day’s birding. A mix-up in the hotel booking made us stay in the far away Dongtai town rather than the nearby Jianggang Town. All in all, it was a comedy of errors with good birding.

Birding in Dongtai :

Land reclamation is the development trend in East China and Dongtai is no exception. The reclamation is happening but not extensively as in the south. After some misdirection due to the incorrect data of the maps, we reached the seawall road when the high tide was retreating. The first bird we saw was the near threatened “Asian Dowitcher“, not just one but 20 birds on the initial count.

Asian Dowitcher pair at Jianggang

With the high tide retreating, birds were leaving the high tide roost and were directly flying above us. Majority of them were Great and Red Knots and they were the majority of the shorebirds during the trip. We also noted 53 Black-faced Spoonbills feeding in the retreating tide.

Red Knot in flight

Great Knots leaving the high tide roost

Terns were numerous in the aquaculture complex, we saw Common, Little, White-winged, Whiskered and Gull-billed Terns.

Big flocks of Tern were seen at the aquaculture farm

Little Tern moulting to non-breeding plumage

White-winged Tern shredding its breeding plumage

On Sunday noon, during the high tide, the shorebird congregation was massive. Especially, the Knots outnumbered the Red-necked Stints.

Great and Red Knots during high tide at Dongtai

Eurasian Oystercatcher

While scanning the sea of waders, we found two flagged birds. One was a locally banded(Chongming) Great Knot and a other one was a yellow flagged Red Knot with letter “WTL”. AWSG said they do not have a bird in their database and it could be either a Hongkong/China bird which has lost one flag.

The Yellow flag is visible on the right tibia.

Apparently, this area seems to be more reliable for Nordmann’s Greenshank but we were not rewarded with any despite two days of scanning.

Nordmann’s – Denied

Goldie Gold losing gold – Pacific Golden Plover

One of the several Red-rumped Swallow’s

An unusual wader

One of the two raptor species of the trip

Local breeders new arrival – Common Redshank

You can’t see me – Fiddler Crab

One of the flocks of Eurasian Curlew

Species List :