In December 2024 there was another visit to the Banc d’Arguin in Mauritania. Mohamed Camara, Bob Loos, Theunis Piersma and Petra de Goeij visited the islands of Arel and Nair and counted the spoonbills and read color rings. 5,100 were counted on the island of Arel and 500 on Nair. It is always special to see spoonbills from all over Western Europe together on these islands.

This time there were spoonbills from (in descending order of numbers) Mauritania, France (Camargue), the Netherlands, Spain, France (Loire Atlantique) Portugal, Morocco, Belgium, Germany, Denmark, Italy and even one from Hungary, which was read by two different people. Most of the color rings read now come from the local Mauritanian breeding population, because Mohamed Camara from the Parc National du Banc d’Arguin and his team annually provide around 120 spoonbill chicks with a red flag and 3 color rings.

In the last century, the Mauritanian spoonbills were distinguished as a separate subspecies (Platalea leucorodia balsaci) on the basis of differences in body size (smaller!) and beak color (black!). DNA observations later confirmed the distinction. In recent years we started to notice more and more that spoonbills walking around with red flags often had a yellow beak tip a la leucorodia. During this visit we noted the color of the beak tip of each ringed spoonbill for which we could clearly see the upper beak. Our impression is that most balsaci spoonbills now have beaks that resemble those of leucorodia. We know that European spoonbills sometimes linger on the Banc d’Arguin to breed. Are there so many of them that they have influenced the beak color of local breeding birds? We can investigate the degree of hybridization using DNA. Mohamed Camara and his team will take DNA samples from the chicks in the coming year.

Two nice sightings of local birds on Arel and Nair respectively are aW[KX]/B[KX] and YLYf/aBG. The first is a female ringed in 2006 on Schiermonnikoog and breeding there. The second was ringed in 2011 on Ellewoutsdijk Zuidgors, never seen in a breeding colony, but is seen almost every year at Wolphaartsdijk, Kwistenburg and the Hoedekenkerkse polder.

Here is a paper that summarizes the Hungarian colour-ringed records in Europe (except Carpathian Basin), Africa, and the Middle East.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/381352151_Spatiotemporal_distribution_of_Eurasian_Spoonbills_Platalea_leucorodia_outside_the_Carpathian_Basin_-the_results_of_the_Hungarian_colour-ringing_project_based_on_twenty_years_2003-2023