20230711 half day tour Flevoland

Early in the morning I (Marko Oudenaarden) met Lynn and Will from the USA at the trainstation of Lelystad for a half day of birding in the Oostvaardersplassen. Before they departed on a river cruise the
next day, they wanted to see some European birds. And the Oostvaardersplassen is a good
place to do that.

We first drove to a hide close to the dike of the IJsselmeer. After telling them some
information about the “polders” and the “New Land” we are visiting today, one of the first
birds we saw was a couple of Great Crested Grebes with two young, one of them hitch-
hiking on the back of his mom.

We walked through the willow bushes to the hide and heard a lot of singing birds, such as
Reed Warbler, Willow Warbler, Garden Warbler and even a Icterine Warbler. All of them
difficult to see in between the bushes. At one point we heard a group of Bearded Tits
(Reedlings) flying by. Again difficult to see. But when you follow a path to a hide, you
sometimes have to follow the same route back. And then we saw one of the highlights of the
day; a young Bearded Tit, just fletched from the nest, was sitting close to the path and didn’t
move. We didn’t either and slowly took out our camera’s. After a few minutes it decided to
fly away into the bushes and leaving us in awe.

After that, we drove to the other side of the National Park and did a walk to visit two hides.
On the way we saw a lot of broken trees and branches from the summer storm which hit the
Netherlands a few days before. Today we had beautiful weather tough.
From the two hides we saw some shorebirds like Redshank, Black-tailed Godwit, Greenshank
and the ones Lynn hoped for; the Ruff’s. From the second hide also a group of foraging
Spoonbills and a Great Egret were seen.

After a cup of coffee in the Information Center of the National Park we made a final walk to
the hides overlooking the great open fields of the Park. On the way we saw Goldfinch,
Greenfinch and a Stonechat. Also some female Marsh Harriers were seen on a distance, but
after that a male Marsh Harrier decided to do a fly-by at only 20 meters from us.

From the last hide we finally saw another ‘much wanted’ bird from Lynn’s list, the White
Tailed Eagle. The first one we saw was just a little dot on a dead tree far away in the
distance. But the second one was sitting in the field right in front of the hide. We didn’t see
it flying with it’s majestic wings, but its large beak was very impressive to see through the
telescope.

Before we drove back to the train station, we made a short visit to the White Storks nesting
close to Lelystad and a House Martin colony nesting under a bridge close to the Storks. Some
of the young Storks were doing some flight exercises, hovering just above the nest. A lovely
finish of our half day of birding.