Five Years of Nordmann’s Greenshank: during Far North Queensland’s Wet Seasons from 2020–2021 to 2024–2025
- Mikey (Hidetoshi) Kudo
- 3 days ago
- 3 min read
Updated: 2 days ago
Hidetoshi (Mikey) Kudo | Cairns Area Coordinator
Editor’s note
At BirdLife Northern Queensland’s (BLNQ) Annual General Meeting (AGM) in April 2025, our Cairns Area Coordinator, Hidetoshi Kudo (known as Mikey) gave a presentation on Nordmann’s Greenshank. The following is a summary of that presentation.
Jennifer H Muir
Arrival and departure
Cairns has been quite fortunate in the last five years in having the opportunity to observe a rare migratory bird species, the Nordmann’s Greenshank. Since this individual is always single when observed at Cairns Esplanade foreshore (mudflat), we have the opportunity to monitor how the individual moults in each season.
Table 1 below shows the first and last sightings of Nordmann’s Greenshank on the Cairns Esplanade foreshore during the past five Wet Seasons. In particular, we note that the last sightings of Nordmann’s Greenshank have been remarkably consistent in the last three seasons.
Table 1. First and last sightings of Nordmann’s Greenshank at Cairns Esplanade Foreshore. Extracted from Walsh (2024).
Season | First sighting | Last sighting |
2020-2021 | Dec 25, 2020 | May 9, 2021 |
2021-2022 | Dec 16, 2021 | Apr 16, 2022 |
2022-2023 | Dec 16, 2022 | Apr 3, 2023 |
2023-2024 | Nov 28, 2023 | Apr 2, 2024 |
2024-2025 | Dec 17, 2024 | Apr 4, 2025 |
Moult
The feathers of our Nordmann’s Greenshank, at arrival, seem to be consistent since the return in December 2022. The pre-basic plumage has clean white underparts and slate grey upperparts, with some worn-out or faded feathers in tertiaries and coverts.
The bird seems to continue on the complete pre-basic moult until the end of February. However, before the completion of the tail moult the scapulars start to show some pre-alternate plumage.
Then the pre-alternate (breeding) moult makes progress until early March.
Moulting then slows down in mid- and late March. This is probably because the bird’s body is trying to store some energy to prepare for the northbound flight (it is not yet known how far it travels).
It is also worth noting that our Nordmann’s Greenshank has never shown primary moult while it stays in Cairns, even though the Cairns Esplanade foreshore provides a good feeding ground for this bird.
The primary flight feathers appear very new upon arrival, suggesting that the bird begins its southbound migration after or near the end of its primary moult. As this moulting process is energy-intensive, the bird likely relies on a staging area with abundant food along its migration route. The moulting cycle is illustrated in Figure 1. Our Nordmann’s Greenshank appears to have been repeating this cycle from the 2022–2023 Wet Season onward.
Diet
Nordmann’s Greenshank seems to prefer small to medium-sized crabs along the Esplanade mudflat.
In 2021, it was observed that Nordmann’s Greenshank caught a large crab and struggled to swallow it several times. Since then, it seems to ignore large crabs and only seems to look for small to medium-sized crabs. Adrian Walsh (pers. comm?) observed that Nordmann’s Greenshank had caught a mudskipper in 2021. I saw the bird eating a left-over fishing bait prawn at the Esplanade beach, showing the bird also had an opportunistic characteristic.
Behaviours
In the past five seasons, Nordmann’s Greenshank showed us various interesting behaviours. The most notable behaviour was kleptoparasitism towards Bar-tailed Godwits. This behaviour can be persistent especially when a Bar-tailed Godwit catches a small crab.
Conservation status
The conservation status of Nordmann’s Greenshank is “Endangered” under the IUCN Red List.
However, this species has not been listed under the Australian Government’s EPBC Act 1999 even though its small world population is estimated as 600–1600 individuals (BirdLife International 2024). This is probably because Nordmann’s Greenshank has been considered a vagrant in Australia. If more of these birds are forced to travel further from their original range due to habitat loss in South-east Asia, the Australian Government might need to acknowledge that Australia becomes an important habitat for them and apply a reasonable conservation status in the future.
Further information
After my presentation, Helen Larson kindly offered to search for an early record of Nordmann’s Greenshank. She subsequently found a description of Nordmann’s Greenshank in the results of an expedition around the world, edited by Adolf Erman. Its specific name “guttifer” (meaning “drop bearing”) seems to be originated from the black marks on the breast. Those black marks are not rounded and are more tear-drop-shaped. Thank you Helen for the information!
References
Walsh, A. (2024). First Record of Nordmann’s Greenshank in Queensland, Australia. IN Stilt 77. Australian Wader Study Group. Pp: 30-41. awsg.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Stilt-77.pdf.
BirdLife International. (2024). IUCN Red List of Threatened Species: Tringa guttifer. IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. www.iucnredlist.org/species/22693225/223484923.
