Salt works are often a great spot for birds. The same goes for the salt works in the town of Puttalam on Sri Lanka’s northwestern coast. This is not a place that’s visited frequently and I haven’t heard much about this spot. Accordingly, I didn’t arrive with many expectations, which was probably good as it allowed me to be pleasantly surprised both by some unexpected species and lovely sightings of the more common ones.
My main target here as Temminck’s Stint, a very rare migrant to Sri Lanka. There were two teacher in my school who were birders as well, and we often exchanged sightings. One of them had told me that they saw this species here the previous year. Obviously this didn’t really mean anything but amazingly, the Temminck’s Stint was the first bird I saw as I drove onto the salt works, in exactly the same pool described by my teacher! I’ve never had such a sighting before, obviously it could’ve been pure chance but given how rare the species is in the country, I could imagine that it was the same returning individual.
The most common waders here were Marsh Sandpipers and Tibetan Sand-Plovers. These species were nearly everywhere, which provided a good opportunity to compare different plumages in each of these species.
Several Little Stints were also around, one of which seemed to need some solitude and decided to feed out in the open shallow water, with no other bird in sight. Because the water was so still, this was a beautiful sight with the bird seemingly placed in the middle of a huge pane of glass.
The nearby beach also held a few Sanderlings, another uncommon bird in Sri Lanka. I often have to laugh at their comical feeding behaviour of sprinting back and forth along the water’s edge, perfectly timing the advance and retreat of each wave. The frantic blur of their legs suggests a rather stressful existence, yet their soft expressions give an impression of complete calm – an odd contradiction.
Puttalam is an interesting place to go birding simply because very few foreign birders visit this town. The only way I could access the salt works was by tuk-tuk, and the driver first thought I was mad. This makes for some quite entertaining conversations, a good distraction when you’re trying to find a Red-necked Stint among the masses of Little Stints. In the end, the driver proved far more cooperative than the Red-necked Stints, and I was more than happy to trade a rarity for an enjoyable conversation about the town and its people.
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