A new bird species has been sighted in the Balswar coast. It was identified as Black-legged Kittiwake. This exciting finding was made when during the course of a recent bird survey on January 21 by a team from Wild Orissa consisting of bird expert Nanda Kishore Bhujabal and photographer Chinmaya Bhujabal. The bird was sitting on a mud heap in a water tank.
It is a small, graceful, cliff-nesting gull, named for its loud, nasal ‘kitti-wake’ call. Its short legs are usually black, helping to distinguish this species. It has a little darker grey marks around the crown and the back of the neck, and a dark mark behind the eye.
A black collar around the back of the neck, dark patches on the neck and behind the eyes and a black tip to the tail, are the other features which are important. The species nests on coastlines and islands across much of the North Pacific and North Atlantic Oceans, as well as on islands off the northern coasts of Russia and Norway, from northern Canada and the northern United States, through Greenland, western and northern Europe, and east as far as the northern Taymyr Peninsula and Severnaya Zemlya in Russia.
Outside of the breeding season, the black-legged kittiwake moves from the coast to the open ocean. It winters across most of the northern Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, as far south as Mexico, West Africa and the East China Sea. Unlike most other gulls, the black-legged kittiwake spends most of the year far out at sea, usually out of sight of land. The first recorded sighting of the Black-legged Kittiwake in India was at Morjim, Goa, on January 16, 2005.