Wings Of Change

The unexpected arrival of the spoonbill to Scotland's shores demonstrates the ever-changing rhythm of nature

- Jim Crumley

OUT there, out among fragmented skeins of gannets foraging north from the Bass Rock, out among the big gulls, out among scrappy terns, out among dark, wave-hugging squadrons of eider ducks, out among the tide-hugging, flat-out swifts down from the pantile and slate rooftops of the villages... Out there, something didn't fit.

A single presence had turned up: a hefty flier angling across the inshore curves of bays and low-tide rocks in a way that suggested a creature thirled more to the flight techniques of, say, a heron, yet decked out in plumage that aligned more towards the couture of gannets.

Self evidently, it was neither of these creatures. Nor was it one of the egret tribe that Scotland has begun to accommodate here and there.

To a watching pair of binoculars determinedly casting about for ever more elusive terns and speculating about passing whales, the intruder presence was something of a distraction.

It was a mild irritant - an off-kilter intrusion into the familiarity of that shoreline.

My first thought when it was still far off had been an injured gannet, but that was ruled out when it turned inland to cut a corner between bays by crossing a headland, which, as a rule, gannets don't do.

Then it turned onto a new shore-wards line that brought it more or less overhead, and in isolated clarity and good light it revealed itself.

Platalea leucorodia, as any self-respecting twitcher will tell you, breeds in a handful of English locations. - notably Norfolk and North Yorkshire - and a pair did breed in Galloway in 2008, but essentially what is beginning to happen is a species recovery after an absence of more than 300 years.

As yet, Scottish sightings are solitary and few and far between, mostly along the east coast. The one that was filling my binoculars was a mile out of Elie on the East Neuk of Fife.