Early December at Slimbridge

 

Water Rail

The winter birding months tend to be mega rarity free and  I wouldn’t expect anything that would be an addition to my Uk bird list until at least April or more probably May. I find it hard to motivate myself to travel long distances for birds that I’ve seen well and photographed so the next 3 months will probably be mainly local.

 

I had a pleasant and relaxed day at Slimbridge on Monday. I hoped to see two scarce birds that had been present for a few days, namely Little Stint and Green-winged Teal. With no pressure to get there at a particular time I rolled up just before 10:00. From the car park I immediately  heard the eerie bugling of the recently returned Bewick Swans. I was, perhaps rather selfishly,  pleased to find very few visitors at the reserve, the combination of a school term weekday and winter having the desired effect. I say selfishly because, of course, the WWT are largely reliant on members and visitors for funding their immensely important conservation work.

 

The Rushy  was teaming with recently arrived wintering wildfowl with Pintails, Teals, and Widgeon present in some number. I was told by a member of staff that Bewick numbers were quite a way down on this time last year, although more are expected to arrive as the winter progresses. Much more worryingly, not a single first winter bird, i.e. hatched this spring, has been recorded. A number of mature and previously successful pairs have returned without offspring. This almost certainly means that they are failed breeders as the youngsters always accompany their parents on first migration.

 

The birds on the Rushy are acclimatised to the presence of humans in the hides and its possible to get very close views and, if you are so inclined, photographs, of the wildfowl. One of my favourites is the Pintail and nowhere else that I know of are they so confiding. The drakes  have somewhat understated but, in my opinion at least, beautiful plumage. The unmistakable drake has a chocolate-brown head and white breast with 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. I already have far too many pictures of this most attractive drake but I can never resist the temptation of taking more at this time of year at Slimbridge.

Pintail

I made my way slowly along to the estuary tower, popping into all the hides on the way. At this time of year it is quite common to see the normally reclusive and shy Water Rail under the feeders at the x hide and sure enough one was pottering around occasionally giving very good views. They really hate being fully out in the open and at one point the Water Rail swam rapidly across a large gap into a reed bed almost as though old Nick ( with apologies to Mr. Truby!) himself was after it! 

 

There is, in my opinion at least, a misconception that bright sunlight provides the best lighting for wildlife photography. While I would agree this is true around the golden hours of sunrise and sunset at other times of the day photography in harsh light can suffer from unseemly shadows on the subject unless the angle to the sun is exactly right. I found this problem particularly in Africa where the strong overhead sun produces challenging lighting for wildlife photography. Quite often diffuse bright light produces better results. This is particularly true for mainly white birds such as gulls where it is very hard to avoid burn out of detail in strongly lit areas. 

Here’s an example of the Slimbridge Water rail when the sun came out. It's very hard to edit out the unseemly effect of these bright patches.

From the estuary tower the flashes were again teaming with wildfowl. The Little Stint had been seen distantly first thing in amongst the much more common Dunlin but had been flushed by something either real or imaginary. I settled down to scope the expansive flashes knowing it was going to take some time to find the Stint. I mentioned I was looking for the Stint to one of the very helpful WWT staff and he helped me look for it. After 10 or 15 minutes he found it in amongst the Dunlins giving me a very late, well at least by my  normal standards, 200^th Uk bird of 2024. Once found its diminutive size made it fairly easy to distinguish from the Dunlin but it was much too far away for photography so here is one I took earlier!

 

Little Stint, Farmoor, Oxfordshire, August 2016

After a warming bowl of soup for lunch in the unusually quiet café I made my way across the reserve to the Zeiss hide to look for the Green-winged Teal, the closely related American cousin of our common Eurasian Teal. In fact there are moves afoot to lump it back in with Eurasian Teal as one species. I recently wrote a blog article on what constitutes a separate species, see here. The Green-winged Teal has rather subtle plumage differences to the Eurasian Teal which can be hard to pick up at a distance. Luckily, there is one prominent differentiating feature, a broad vertical white stripe on the flank which replaces the horizontal white stripe on its European counterpart. With more than 1,000 mostly distant Eurasian Teal present I thought that this was going to be another long scope job but I struck lucky and soon found it swimming distantly on the flashes. While this only affords one star rarity status in the Collins bird bible, I was surprised, on checking my records when I got home, that this is the first one I have seen since 2017, a nice way to end a very chilled out day with no twitching pressure.

 

 Footnote – my blogs are posted with sometimes rather imaginative spelling and grammar due to my extreme dyslexia!