KENYA: Crab Plovers at Mida Creek

There are few places in the world where you can watch the tide come in at an extraordinary rate, advancing before your eyes. The mangrove-lined Mida Creek (above) is one of them, linked to the Indian Ocean just south of Malindi on coastal Kenya. The incoming tide appeared deceptively far away, but our guide, Willie, hurries Todd and I along the vast expanse of exposed mudflats to maximize our time with the feeding shorebirds.

Excitedly we set up our scopes and scanned the shallow waters along the tidal mudflats. We admire godwits, sand-plovers, stints, greenshanks, egrets, terns and a distant grouping of pink flamingos, but we are really after one of the world’s most unique shorebirds, the Crab Plover. They are not hard to spot, and soon we have half a dozen in our sights.

Crab Plovers (above) are about the size of an avocet but bulkier, white-and-black birds with long, blue-grey legs. While they may resemble a large plover, it is likely that they are more closely related to pratincoles and coursers.

Their heavy, black, pointed bill, similar to that of a tern, is specialized for eating crabs. Judging by the holes in the mud and the amount of crabs visible, there is ample supply of food here for them. Males sport a longer, heavier bill than females. We watch one bird walking towards us, patiently stalking, just taking its time, pausing every so often as it sees a crab make a quick get away.

Crab Plovers are unique among shorebirds in that they nest underground in sandbanks, in burrows about five feet in length and at least a foot deep. Unlike other shorebirds who produce a clutch of well camouflaged eggs, Crab Plovers lay only one white egg. While most wader chicks are precocial, Crab Plover chicks are born unable to walk, and stay in their burrows until they are able to do so, totally dependent upon their parents to care for them even after fledging.

Crab Plovers are one of only two shorebirds (pratincoles being the other) that breeds in colonies. Only about a dozen breeding sites are known in the Middle East around the Red Sea. They spend their winters, August through April, along the East African coast, and Mida Creek is one of the best and easiest locations to see them.

With a population of about 50,000 individuals dependent upon relatively few breeding areas and fragile coastal habitat, Crab Plovers are considered a globally endangered species.

The tide rises rapidly before our eyes, flooding the mudflats and forcing the birds to fly further up the creek to higher ground. We watch the last of them fly away, and then turn to the elevated boardwalk to make our way back.