Pied avocets keep their annual date with Perumbakkam wetland

With water at the wetland drying up at the rate of knots, there was a sneaking suspicion it would miss out on its usual fag-end-of-season sights including pied avocets

There are attention-grabbing beaks and then some. Where two avian species are spitting images of each other and it is a challenge to tell them apart, the beak sometimes settles the issue. The colour, the thickness, the base of the beak and so on. Sometimes, the beak is so unique and one does not have to study any other diagnostic feature — just a hazy outline of the beak can have the rest of the bird identified from a mile away. The pied avocet sports a whole bunch of features (not just the beak, downside-up and as thin as the lines in an engineering drawing) that enable it to be identified with one eye fully and the other half-closed.

For the last few days, though stationed in the central patch of Perumbakkam wetland that has retained some water, a flock of pied avocets forage for food, often in the company of black-winged stilts.

Anyone who has seen the bird earlier, marvelled at its upturned beak, as also its overall uniquess (it is pied in a manner no other pied birds are pied) and knows the species is “engineered” to show up at the wetland around this time of the year, its presence would now register from a mile away, with one-and-a-half eyes closed and with no assistance from a pair of binoculars to that half-open eye.

The pied avocet is a bird of coastal wetlands, and it cannot but ink in Perumbakkam wetland in its winter itinerary. A fag-ender species, it puts in an appearance at the Perumbakkam wetland when the waters have dipped remarkably and there are enough shallows to settle on.

This time around, the dipping was swifter than before and there was a disconcerting thought that the process might not match the pied avocet’s regular timing. That is might be too quick for the bird. The last few days have proved the thinking pleasantly erroneous. Pied avocets were earlier reported from another coastal wetland, Kelambakkam. And then they show up at Perumbakkam wetland too, honouring an annual commitment.