Times of India | 2 months ago | 27-11-2022 | 11:50 pm
Panaji: A Goan birder’s rare luck in photographing a Crab Plover holding a crab in its beak at Agasaim beach piqued interest locally and abroad. Posted on a popular website, the pretty picture unveiled, once again, the quiet stretch as a paradise for rarely seen waders.The curving sandy beach with a wide intertidal zone on Zuari river mouth stretches in scenic isolation for about five kms. Verna-based birder, Justino Rebello’s photo – a click every birder would crave to take – evidently inspired Nathaniel Wander, a US painter and researcher, so much that he did a painting on it “in gouache and water colour pencil” and posted it on the same link. “For me, it was a shot of a life time – the wader holding a crab, its staple food and after which it has been named,” Rebello said.The waders mostly prefer a salt water environment - beaches and estuaries. Morjim, other estuaries and beach spots were hotspots for these birds in the past. But noisy footfalls, stray dogs, construction activity and other factors have turned into major stressors for avian biodiversity. In Agasaim, the desolate beach is an idyllic habitat for waders at low tide. Just a few fishermen or men walking their fighter buffaloes and birders are seen here.“The estuary of Zuari contains more mud than sand washed down from the hinterland along with the usual garbage - organic and plastic. The consequence is Agasaim beach is a mud flat with a spread of organic nutrients than a beach, which is good for birds and bad for tourists,” Savio Fonseca, chief naturalist with a tourism company, said. The Zuari and Mandovi estuaries have a few similarities, but the Zuari mouth is much wider and in terms of avian biodiversity, Agasaim largely hosts more rarely seen bird life than Miramar.“Beside birds, the (Agasaim) site is abundant with sand bubbler crabs and organisms which sadly the scientific community in Goa has largely ignored,” Fonseca said.Concurring with this view, Jalmesh Karapurkar, a member of Goa Bird Conservation Network stated that the rich diversity and amount of food attracts a lot of migratory birds with different feeding mechanisms. “Agasaim tidal mudflats exposed at the time of low tide are rich in nutrients and therefore you see crustaceans and molluscs flourishing here,” he said. The rare waders, though, other than hundreds of gulls visiting this hotspot may not be in huge numbers. “Among the many migratory birds that arrive here, the lesser spotted ones may be just one or two birds of a species. But a trip here is rewarding, as one may spot the Great knot, Sanderling, Eurasian oyster catcher, Indian skimmer, Curlew sandpiper and even a rarer Broad-billed sandpiper in this natural bird habitat,” Rebello said.Three passages, including a partly tarred road and a pathway lead to this southwestern tip of Tiswadi offering a stunning view of the surroundings. In the past, the area formed part of Goa’s ancient capital. “The vast expanse of intertidal zone once served as a bustling port and ship repair centre in pre-Portuguese era of trade with the Arabs. There is an appropriate need to conserve this area as a historical and heritage site as well as a site of biological importance,” Fonseca said.
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