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| Bewick's Swan |
Late autumn is, in my humble opinion, the very best time to visit Slimbridge. At this time of year wetlands are absolutely teeming with migrant wildfowl returning from their artic breeding grounds. Amongst the common wildfowl, Teal, Widgeon, Pintail etc., you should find Bewick's Swan and White-fronted Goose, nationally scarer birds but Slimbridge regulars.
Thursday dawned very dull but I decided to go to Slimbridge anyway and was rewarded with a couple of hours of lovely wintery light, much paler and less harsh that the strong summer sun and much better for photography.
The Rushy hide is my favourite hide for photography at Slimbridge. At this time of year the sun is behind the hide which is low down providing a more natural angle for photographing the birds. It is also a great place to view and photograph one of my favourite UK ducks, the Pintail. At other sites they tend to be fairly skittish and distant but at Slimbridge they are very confiding often being found right next to the Rushy hide. I guess this is due in part to the late afternoon winter feeding program run from outside the Rushy hide.
It is a duck species with a very wide geographic distribution breeding in the northern areas of Europe right across the Palearctic and North America. It is migratory and winters south of its breeding range right down to the equator.
The male is a very attractive duck with a chocolate-brown head and white breast and a white stripe extending up the side of the neck. Its upperparts and sides are grey but elongated grey feathers with black central stripes are draped across the back from the shoulder area. The vent area is yellow, contrasting with the black underside of the tail. The bill is bluish and the legs are blue grey.
There were perhaps 20 male and female birds in front of the hide and the males in particular looked resplendent in their recently renewed plumage.
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| Pintail |
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| Shellduck |
There were also five recently arrived Bewick's Swans on the Rushy. These and our other winter visitors, the Whooper Swan are readily distinguishable from our resident Mute Swan by the Yellow base to their bill. They have a very distinctive call which is very hard to describe but is a rather eerie drawn out bugling sound. Two smart Pochard were also swimming around with the Swans.
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| Bewick's Swan |
Whenever I take a photo of a Bewick's the bill base always seems to come out a darker yellow than their actual pale yellow . For some reason no amount of messing around with colour balance, camera settings and post shot development ever seem to bring it back to its real life natural pale yellow colour.
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| Pochard |
After a pleasant hour or so in the Rushy hide I walked around the other hides on that side of the reserve where I found perhaps fifty or so White-fronted Goose feeding on the grassy pastures. There are two subspecies which, given the current fashion, will almost certainly be split into two distinct species in the future, namely the Greenland and Russian subspecies. Those found during winter at Slimbridge are normally the Russian type. The white ring on the forehead immediately adjacent to the bill gives them their name but it is a necessary but not sufficient diagnostic as some feral and hybrid Greylags also show this. The bold black barring on the chest and noticeable smaller size, however, is normally sufficient to distinguish them from Greylags.
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| White-fronted Geese, middle picture has larger Greylag for comparison |
From the estuary tower in amongst the feral Barnacle geese I could see the long staying, presumed escaped Ross’s goose, a small goose similar in appearance to a Snow Goose. When I got home and looked at my pictures I noticed that it was ringed so I posted a picture on the casual twitchers WhatsApp group to see if anyone could help me identify its origin. After some debate it was discovered that it had been caught at ringed at Frampton. I have to say who knows why as this seems to be a needless example of ringing for ringing sake with no obvious scientific benefit for the species.
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