Jeremiah Loei has succeeded in documenting this elusive female von Schrenck’s Bittern (Ixobrychus eurhythmus) foraging in a muddy patch of a degraded mangrove. Towards the end of the clip, the bittern encounters a mudskipper. Either showed no hostilities towards the other. It is usually difficult to spot this bittern as it becomes active only at dawn and dusk, although sometimes it can be seen during the day.
The von Schrenck’s Bittern is an uncommon winter visitor and passage migrant to Singapore. It arrives mainly between October and December. Some of the arrivals are passage migrants and these soon fly south, to return back in March. The returning passage migrants join the population of winter visitors to refuel before the entire migrant population gradually flies back to their breeding grounds in the north. By June all of them will have flown back.
More details of the bittern and mudskipper can be found in Jeremiah’s Facebook LINK.
Jeremiah Loei
Singapore
June 2013
