Eco Hvar

Black-winged stilts at Soline

A rare sighting of an endangered species, with thanks to Alison and Bojan Bujić.

Black-winged stilt. Black-winged stilt. Photo: J.M.Garg

Alison Bujić by e-mail 22nd April 2016. We have just returned from a lovely walk around the Soline peninsula where Bojan spotted a pair of Black-winged Stilts standing motionless in a rock-pool.  We watched them for some time with binocs, hoping to see them catch something but in the end we gave up.  They are stunning to look at with their long bright red legs - do you or your bird-expert friend know about them and are they unusual here? We had no idea what they were until we looked them up when we came home.

 

Reply from Steve Jones, April 22nd 2016: I haven't seen them here but am familiar with the bird. Soline is a bit out of "my patch", all of my watching is in and around Dol/Stari Grad due to time restrictions. I will make a note - even when I was "holidaying" I hadn't come across them before. So a good record. Looking at one of my books I would suggest quite unusual/rare to see here but certainly not impossible and I would have no reason to doubt it as they are quite distinctive.

The Croatian State Institution for Nature Protection classifies the black-winged stilt as “critically endangered“. The description certainly illustrates why this bird should be protected: 

“The black-winged stilt is a very social bird. Outside of nesting season, they remain in small flocks of 5 to 10 birds, and are occasionally included in mixed flocks with other shorebirds. They are rarely solitary. Large flocks are common at resting areas. They nest in colonies, usually containing 10 to 40 pairs. They are monogamous, with the relationship between partners lasting one nesting season. They build their nests on the ground, on islands or spits surrounded by shallow water, occasionally even on dry ground. Building the nest, incubating the eggs and raising the young is the task of both parents. The brood usually consists of four eggs that hatch in 22-23 days, and the young birds are independent within 2 to 4 weeks.

The black-winged stilt began to nest in Croatia at the end of the 20th century, and today, few of these birds nest at only a few known localities.”

 Alison, April 22nd 2016: Thank you - this is really interesting and confirms Bojan's suspicion that they may have strayed from the Neretva delta area.

Photo of black-winged stilt by J.M.Garg (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia CommonsHTML

Related items

back to top
You are here: Home Charity: Official Nature Watch Black-winged stilts at Soline

Eco Environment News feeds

  • This year’s Christmas could be Britain’s greenest yet, energy operator says

    System operator Neso predicts lowest carbon intensity ever on Christmas Day after new wind and solar power come online

    Britain’s energy system operator has predicted that this year’s Christmas Day could be the greenest yet.

    If the weather remains mild and windy for the rest of December, the National Energy System Operator (Neso) has said it could record the lowest carbon intensity – the measure of how much carbon dioxide is released to produce electricity – recorded on the network for 25 December.

    Continue reading...

  • Country diary: There’s more to mistletoe than Christmas kisses | Kate Blincoe

    Caistor St Edmund, Norfolk: Wildlife seems to like it as much as we do, and if you’re patient, you can make like a mistle thrush and spread it around

    Stripped of their leaves, the trees are sculptural against the grey sky, revealing what is usually obscured. Trunks thick with ivy offer roosting sites for wrens and robins. Messy rook nests sway precariously in the breeze. And of course great balls of mistletoe, suspended among the bare branches as if put up for the festive season, although there all year round. Some trees have so many of the evergreen orbs in them that they appear to be in spring leaf.

    For a parasite, mistletoe has a unique position in our hearts: from Greek mythologies, where it offered a gateway to the underworld, to the druids’ ceremonial links with fertility, which probably seeded our modern-day kisses under the mistletoe.

    Continue reading...

  • Food becoming more calorific but less nutritious due to rising carbon dioxide

    Researchers noticed ‘dramatic’ changes in nutrients in crops, including drop in zinc and rise in lead

    More carbon dioxide in the environment is making food more calorific but less nutritious – and also potentially more toxic, a study has found.

    Sterre ter Haar, a lecturer at Leiden University in the Netherlands, and other researchers at the institution created a method to compare multiple studies on plants’ responses to increased CO2levels. The results, she said, were a shock: although crop yields increase, they become less nutrient-dense. While zinc levels in particular drop, lead levels increase.

    Continue reading...

  • Week in wildlife: honeymooning owls, an otter on the razz and a magical frog

    This week’s best wildlife photographs from around the world

    Continue reading...

  • ‘Radiator rattling’ earthquake hits Lancashire village for second time in two weeks

    People of Silverdale report rattling and shaking as 2.5 magnitude earthquake strikes in probable aftershock

    A village in Lancashire has been hit by a “radiator rattling” earthquake for the second time in little over two weeks.

    Residents of Silverdale, a small coastal village located five miles south of the Cumbria border, reported the now strangely familiar feeling of rattling and shaking in their homes at 5.03am as a 2.5-magnitude earthquake hit the area with its epicentre 1.6 miles (2.6km) off the coast.

    Continue reading...

  • Country diary: Postcard from a pier, where brent geese are the main attraction | Lev Parikian

    Ryde, Isle of Wight: Lots of commotion here among the hovercraft and herring gulls, but it’s the wonderful, tubby geese that make my winter

    There’s a hovercraft on the sand, skirts deflated, dumped like a beached whale. Behind it, the pier stretches into the Solent. The air has the dull taste of off-season resort, with background notes of seaweed and vinegar. Welcome to Ryde.

    We eat fish and chips, fending off the attention of a hungry herring gull. The clicks and whistles of 20 starlings float towards our ears from over the road. A pied wagtail, manic wind-up toy, scurries beside us. Stop, start, whirr.

    Continue reading...

  • They survived wildfires. But something else is killing Greece’s iconic fir forests

    In the Peloponnese mountains, the usually hardy trees are turning brown even where fires haven’t reached. Experts are raising the alarm on a complex crisis

    In the southern Peloponnese, the Greek fir is a towering presence. The deep green, slow-growing conifers have long defined the region’s high-altitude forests, thriving in the mountains and rocky soils. For generations they have been one of the country’s hardier species, unusually capable of withstanding drought, insects and the wildfires that periodically sweep through Mediterranean ecosystems. These Greek forests have lived with fire for as long as anyone can remember.

    So when Dimitrios Avtzis, a senior researcher at the Forest Research Institute (FRI) of Elgo-Dimitra, was dispatched to document the aftermath of a spring blaze in the region, nothing about the assignment seemed exceptional. He had walked into countless burnt landscapes, tracking the expected pockets of mortality, as well as the trees that survived their scorching.

    Continue reading...

  • Snails on a plane: Australia flies rescue mission to Norfolk Island for a tiny, critically endangered species

    The Campbell’s keeled glass-snail is officially extinct, but researchers have ‘high hopes’ that translocation will allow the population to thrive

    On a grey day in early June, a commercial plane landed at Norfolk Island Airport in the South Pacific. Onboard was precious cargo ferried some 1,700km from Sydney: four blue plastic crates with “LIVE ANIMALS” signs affixed to the outside.

    Inside were thumbnail-sized snails, hundreds of them, with delicate, keeled shells. The molluscs’ arrival was the culmination of an ambitious plan five years in the making: to bring a critically endangered species back from the brink.

    Continue reading...

  • ‘The biggest transformation in a century’: how California remade itself as a clean energy powerhouse

    The Golden State’s clean energy use hit new highs in 2025. As the Trump administration abandons US climate initiatives, can California fill the void?

    As officials from around the world met in Brazil for the Cop30 climate summit last month, the US president was nowhere to be found, nor were any members of his cabinet. Instead, the most prominent American voice in Belém was that of the California governor, Gavin Newsom.

    During the five days he spent in Brazil, Newsom described Donald Trump as an “invasive species” and condemned his rollback of policies aimed at reducing emissions and expanding renewable energy. Newsom, long considered a presidential hopeful, argued that, as the US retreated, California would step up in its place as a “stable, reliable” climate leader and partner.

    Continue reading...

  • Was 2025 the year that business retreated from net zero?

    From retailers to banks, carmakers to councils, the bold pledges for carbon-neutral economies are being watered down or scrapped

    Almost a year since Donald Trump returned to the White House with a rallying cry to the fossil fuel industry to “drill baby, drill”, a backlash against net zero appears to be gathering momentum.

    More companies have retreated from, or watered down, their pledges to cut carbon emissions, instead prioritising shareholder returns over climate action.

    Continue reading...

Eco Health News feeds

Eco Nature News feeds

Copyright © 2025 Eco Hvar. All Rights Reserved. Developed by Orion Informatika.