An Indian Skimmer works the slack tides at Dharamtar Creek

An Indian Skimmer (*Rynchops albicollis*) has been working the Dharamtar Creek estuary at Mlrapada, on the Raigad shore south of Uran.¹ Four separate reports have come in there since August 22, 2026, with a high count of 1 on every visit, so this is most likely a single bird being re-found on successive trips out.¹

The skimmer is built around one trick. Its lower mandible is noticeably longer than the upper, thin and blade-like, and the bird feeds by flying just above calm water with that lower blade slicing the surface.² When the blade touches a fish, the head snaps down and the bill closes on it in a fraction of a second, without the bird ever breaking stride. It hunts by touch rather than sight, which lets it work at dusk and into the night when small fish rise to the surface film. Sheltered creek water at slack tide, like the channels between the mangroves and mudflats at Dharamtar, is exactly the kind of flat surface the method needs; it does not work in chop.

Recognizing one among the terns is straightforward once the bill is seen. It is tern-sized with long, narrow wings and a black cap running down the back and upperwing, white below and across the forehead. The bill is thick, orange-red and tipped yellow, and the lower half visibly overshoots the upper. In flight the wingbeats are slow and deep for a bird this size, and it holds low over the water rather than hovering and plunging the way terns do.

Skimmers are river birds for most of the year. They breed in the dry season on open sandbars of the big north Indian rivers, the Chambal and the Ganga chief among them, laying in a scrape in bare sand before the monsoon comes up and floods the bars. Once the young are flying and the rivers rise, the birds scatter, and some reach the tidal creeks and estuaries of the west coast. A bird at Dharamtar in the last week of August fits that post-breeding movement, arriving as the monsoon eases and the creek water settles.

The species is listed as Endangered; nesting sandbars are lost to dams, sand mining, and the pressure of people and livestock on the few rivers that still run free enough to build them.² Dharamtar Creek offers the other half of the year: quiet tidal water, mudflats full of small fish, and mangrove edges to roost against. Anyone birding the Uran and Rewas shoreline this month should scan the low flyers over the creek at first and last light.