Know Your Vogels 2 - Rise of the Polder

Birding in the Netherlands, continued

Welcome to Owl My Children, a monthly newsletter where I recount my exciting bird moments from the past (three) month(s) and share more photos from my first ever trip across the Atlantic.

Happy October! I just returned from a trip to Madison, where I got to attend my friends’ wedding and do some lovely end-of-fall-migration birding. The sandhill cranes bugled in celebration of my return, and the red-breasted nuthatches apologized to me on behalf of their Pittsburgh-based cousins, who have so rudely avoided me this year.

But enough about Wisconsin! Last month I promised to tell you about my journey to a fabled land known as Crezéepolder.

It begins with absence and desire*

For the first four days of my six-day trip to the Netherlands, my birding was limited to city parks. This was not a bad thing, especially considering how nice the city parks in Amsterdam were. In Vondelpark, white storks nested in very public spaces, rose-ringed and Alexandrine parakeets screamed from the trees, and one great spotted woodpecker lurked in a thicket. (It was the only woodpecker I saw during my entire trip. The lack of woodpeckers in the Netherlands was shocking.) In Amsterdamse Bos, a 2,471-acre forest in Amsterdam-Zuid, song thrushes haunted the paths, great-crested grebe babies swam very close to the rowing teams that were practicing on the Bosbaan, and a common buzzard (remember, Europeans call them buzzards, we call them hawks) soared over a meadow where highland cattle grazed.

Still, most of these parks featured similar habitats, which meant that I mostly saw the same kinds of birds in each place. But I was feeling greedy. I was in a new country, and I wanted to see EVERY BIRD I COULD POSSIBLY SEE. And there was one massive category of birds I was missing: shorebirds. Wouldn’t it be a waste to go all the way to the Netherlands, a country located on the North Sea, and NOT look for shorebirds??

This is how I latched onto Crezéepolder. On eBird, it seemed to be the most reliable spot for shorebirds near Rotterdam. Crezéepolder is not located on the sea, but it’s positioned on the tidal Noord River, and the tides create a unique habitat of meadow + mudflats. I really wanted to see it, especially after we took the train from Amsterdam to Rotterdam and zoomed past other polders that seemed to be crawling with birds. I tried to ID everything from my window, but we were going too fast and I got motion sick.

Shorebirds are also notoriously difficult to identify, because you usually see them very far away, and they’re tiny, and there are only subtle differences between species. You usually have to lug a spotting scope around if you want to get a good look at them, and most of the time you still just shrug and say, “Guess I’ll never know what THAT is.”

But the nice thing about shorebirds is that they’re not flitting around in the leaves, completely backlit by the sun, the way warblers are. So you can usually get a photo of them if you have a stupidly gigantic lens like I do, and then you can take your time identifying them once you get them uploaded to your computer. Is this cheating? Before I had a camera, I would have said yes. But now I have a camera, and I say it’s simply “being resourceful.”

Polder problems

There were several issues when it came to planning a trip to Crezéepolder. First, Google maps thought I would need to take several trains and a bus to get there, then walk a few miles. It was in a rural area, so I had no idea if I would have cell service. There were also tides, and I needed to plan my visit around low tide. (If the water was too high, there’d be no shorebirds.) But the Crezéepolder website didn’t seem to have a tide chart, so I had to find a general tide chart of the Noord River and hope that I got it right.

I was also afraid of doing the journey on my own, especially because I worried I’d look stupid and/or get lost while navigating public transportation. All the trains, trams, and buses in the Netherlands are accessible simply by tapping your credit card when you enter and exit, which is amazing, but it was so easy I was suspicious of it. What happened if my credit card didn’t work? What happened if the bus driver didn’t let me off the bus?

Then there was the problem of my knee, which has always been kind of creaky, but doing 30,000+ steps each day when we were in Amsterdam had rendered it basically nonfunctional. I had to keep my leg straight and drag it around behind me while I walked. This was going to be a major issue if I had to walk a few miles to get to the polder. The added weight of my camera made this even more daunting.

So, the night before Michael’s conference, I told myself it just wasn’t going to work out. I couldn’t do it. I probably couldn’t even do it with a good knee.

But then I looked at eBird again, at all the birds I hadn’t seen but COULD see if I went to Crezéepolder. Michael was prepping for his conference, but every few minutes I’d sigh and say, “barnacle geese” or “northern lapwings.” So Michael went out to a dollar store and bought me a knee brace for 4 euros (he actually bought three of them, because we had no idea what size would fit and everything was in Dutch). Then he figured out all of the trains and buses we would need to take, and where exactly we would walk, and when, approximately, low tide would be, and he resolved to go with me on Friday after his conference. Michael is the best!

Spoiler: We made it! And everything was in Dutch! (Cell phone photo by me)

It’s time

So on Friday, instead of visiting all the parks I’d planned to visit, I holed up in the hotel and read Birding with Benefits** and tried to rest my knee. I was so anxious about Crezéepolder that I couldn’t focus on much, and I just kept thinking about how bad I’d feel if we got stranded in the rural Dutch countryside and Michael had to carry me all the way back to the bus stop.

But when the time came, I braced up and we took a train to the tram, which carried us out of Rotterdam and into the countryside. We watched as the commuters slowly trickled out of the tram, and soon our car pretty much emptied out. The landscape flattened out and opened up; the surrounding buildings got smaller and smaller. Nothing was in English anymore. Finally we got out and waited at the bus stop for the 489 bus. There was no one else around. When the bus pulled up, it was the fanciest bus we’d ever been on—much nicer than a Greyhound, with a digital screen illustrating every stop. We were the only people on the bus, apart from the driver.

Over an hour into our journey, we arrived at a tree-lined road in what seemed to be the middle of nowhere. We got off the bus and followed a path along a small canal. There were two tufted ducks in the water—lifers!

Our walk to the polder didn’t feel like a walk at all, because there were birds everywhere, and that’s what we were here to do, anyway. So we slowly inched along the path and into the fields, birding all the way, and then we saw the mudflats, and every time I saw a new bird I’d say, “I’d be happy if this is the only bird we see the whole time. This was worth it.”

But we just keep seeing more birds.

You can’t tell, but I’m crying with joy in this picture. (Photo by Michael)

Crezéebirds

When we approached the water/mudflats, the first bird we saw, really close up, was a northern lapwing. When I studied for my trip, I classified northern lapwings as “extravagant killdeer.” Both are in the plover family, but northern lapwings look so wild in photos: they have iridescent feathers and a silly wisp on the back of the head, and their wings in flight are shaped like boomerangs. When I looked out over the mudflats, I realized they were literally everywhere. I eBirded 200 of them, but I’m certain there were more.

Top: A northern lapwing flying over Eurasian coots at Crezéepolder. Bottom left: The first northern lapwing we saw. Bottom right: A killdeer in Wisconsin. (All photos by me)

As we walked along the (absolutely gorgeous) path, I kept seeing more lifers. There were mute swans out in the water—and they weren’t considered “exotic”! (In all the places I’ve lived, if you see a mute swan, they get an asterisk on eBird, because they’re not native and were previously released here. But mute swans are native to Europe!) We saw graylag geese and barnacle geese and lots of little shorebirds out on the flats that ended up being a mix of ruffs and common sandpipers. There were coots, moorhens, and black-headed gulls, which I’d already seen several times during our trip, but there were also Eurasian oystercatchers, which were new.

I LOVE an oystercatcher, and I’ve now seen three different kinds (a black oystercatcher out in Monterey, an American oystercatcher in Florida with my bird buddies, and Eurasian oystercatchers in the Netherlands!).

Top: A very close Eurasian oystercatcher! (Photo by me) Bottom left: An American oystercatcher with a mollusk (maybe even an oyster). (Photo by me) Bottom right: Can you find the black oystercatcher? Michael was trying to take a picture with his phone, through my binoculars, of these cormorants, but ended up with a surprise guest. (Photo by Michael)

We also got to see a bird I hadn’t dared to hope for: Eurasian spoonbills! I only recently saw my first spoonbill here in the US, when my friends and I went to Florida. Those were roseate spoonbills, which are pink. In the Netherlands, the spoonbills are pure white, but just as weird and quirky. Here’s a cell phone video I took of a Eurasian spoonbill doing a unique spoonbill behavior, sweeping its bill side to side in the water to stir up crustaceans and small fish.

(Cell phone video by me!)

All in all, we spent about two hours at Crezéepolder before my knee couldn’t go any farther. I saw 11 lifers, and maybe even more importantly, I saw this beautiful place that I never would have seen if not for birds.

Michael crossing a very narrow bridge at Crezéepolder. (Photo by me)

The tide was coming in, and the Summer Olympics opening ceremonies were about to start, so we made our way back to the bus stop. That’s when we learned that our bus had been re-routed, and another bus wouldn’t be coming for an hour. But Michael had enough service on his phone to learn that we only needed to walk ten minutes through Ridderkerk to get to another bus that could take us back to the hotel. So we made our way through quiet, idyllic streets, hardly seeing any other humans, laughing at the Egyptian geese that perched on top of telephone poles, and we didn’t feel upset about the delay. It was such a pretty night, in such a pretty town, and we were in Europe! Who would’ve thought?

May this month be filled with birds, cool habitats, and trashy TV (who’s watching The Golden Bachelorette??),

Holly

*I’ve been watching A Discovery of Witches on Netflix, which is basically Twilight but featuring thirty-year-olds. Every episode opens with the phrase, “It begins with absence and desire,” which I think is a good indicator of how ridiculous the show is.

**This book is… really something. I couldn’t read it on the plane because I was worried someone would see over my shoulder.