Oriental Pratincole over-load !

After coming back from a wader count at 80 Mile beach, where 500,000 Oriental Pratincole had been counted, the team encountered 60,000 on Roebuck Plains. So a few days later i went to have a look and arriving on the plains we easily picked up the flocks wheeling around in the sky some incredibly high but starting to come down closer and finally coming in low to land.

With a few raptors around the flocks gathered into tight groups and circled around and around in huge numbers.

Grasshoppers that the Oriental Pratincole were feeding on in plague proportions.

The pratincole after hawking insects high, and avoiding predators started coming into roost and landing in the tussocky grasslands of Roebuck Plains.

A closer shot of the thousands of pratincole coming into roost

Once the sun was setting the birds left what we thought would be the roost site and heded out low over the grassland hawking for insects like nightjar.