Spoonbills all year round in the Dutch Delta area

by Mark Hoekstein/ on 21 Feb 2024

Spoonbills all year round in the Dutch Delta area

Nowadays it is possible to see spoonbills in the Delta area in every month of the year. That was quite different in the past. In the late 1980s, the population of spoonbills in the Netherlands was still recovering from the major blow inflicted by pesticides in the aquatic environment. A group of spoonbills was a rare sight; it was only around 1990 that more than a hundred were counted in the Delta Area for the first time. Nowadays you can see groups of several hundred in large quiet wetland such as the Kwade Hoek at Goeree, the Prunje at Schouwen-Duiveland and the Verdronken Land van Saeftinghe on the Western Scheldt. The best chance seeing this is in late summer, when they have left the colonies and parents and young gather in such areas. After the annual peak in August, numbers begin to decline. In the graph below you see the average number of spoonbills per month over the last five years. Around mid-September, quite a few have already left, but the numbers are still high because spoonbills from the more northern Wadden Islands and also from Germany and Denmark also come to rest here some days. At the beginning of October the last large groups leave and just small groups are left.

In recent years they increasingly linger in winter. Until the turn of the century, a wintering spoonbill was very rare. Winter groups at certain places have become more or less common. It is not just that there are more of them in winter just because there are more spoonbills; actually a larger share of the population now stays here. From less than 1% of the seasonal maximum until 2005, it has now risen to around 5% of the current maximum. This phenomenon of more and more wintering spoonbills initially mainly occurred in the Delta area, because the winters there are slightly milder than in the rest of the country. Now you can also encounter them in other places, albeit in lower numbers.

Of course, we also look at the ages of these wintering spoonbills and whether they are ringed. It appeares that these groups mainly consist of young birds. In most cases they do not hibernate in subsequent winters. But there are a few exceptions: in the Prunje on Schouwen-Duiveland and the surrounding area, two ringed birds are currently wintering for the fifth consecutive year (aYY/NfRP and W[NAVT] for the expert observers). In the winters of 2009-2012, W[EN]/B[EN] already preceded them in the same region. NfRY/aRY is already experiencing its seventh winter along the south coast of Zuid-Beveland this year.

Spoonbills on ice in winter 2020/2021, video-still of television program ‘Vroege Vogels’.

Spoonbills on ice in winter 2020/2021, video-still of television program ‘Vroege Vogels’.