A close encounter with rusty: Ferruginous Duck at Woolston Eyes and real Lancashire Geese

 

As a pre-teen, my absolute favourite word was “ferruginous”.  I learned it while obsessively reading a field guide in my bedroom and attempted to use it at every possible juncture.  “That man has a ferruginous beard,” or “careful with that untreated ironwork, it may become ferruginous.”  Typical phrases for a precocious 10 year old.  So of course, on learning that there was a male Ferruginous Duck at Woolston Eyes, I headed across in the midday sunlight, hoping to also see Black-necked Grebes and some early Sand Martins.

Every view of Fudge Duck I’ve had before has been distant – a female at Hornsea Mere which may as well have been in another country it was so far out; a male in a ditch in Cambridgeshire that poked its arse out for a couple of seconds in three hours of waiting and watching; a dodgy bird in the late 90s that could have been a hybrid tufted duck female seen through an April squall of rain so intense I still shiver when I think of it now.  So when I navigated the awkward gates at Woolston without in fact losing any of my fingers and stood on the bridge over the oxbow to access Bed 3, to be told that this stunning male Fudge had been showing down to 20 metres in good light but had just, literally, just vanished into thick bank overgrowth, it was no real surprise.  I was stuck in two minds.  Should I wait on the bridge, or should I go through to Morgan hide and scan for a while, letting the Fudge work its way back out?  I chose the latter option, and spent a pleasant hour talking with Brian Martin and helping count Shelduck and Pochard, seeing Brambling and Willow Tit from the hide.

On my return, the bridge – rated to hold 4 adults – was full from end to end.  The Ferruginous Duck, happily, was pottering about near some Tufted Ducks, in and out of the undergrowth and eventually swam out to the middle of the oxbow in glorious sunshine.  The starkly white eye in those beautiful chestnut and glossy rich brown tones and the crisp white undertail, the sharp definition of the bill pattern – the whole experience was well worth the effort put in to see this rusty beauty.

 

By contrast, the following day, I decided to head to Lancashire to see if I could locate a couple of scarce or rare geese.  A Lesser White-fronted Goose has been associating with a huge flock of Pink-footed Geese in Thurnham and Cockerham.  Though there has been a recent mini-influx of these rare geese, the flocks are comprised of the reintroduced birds in Sweden that move between southern Scandinavia, the Netherlands and, increasingly, the east coast of the UK.  Several flocks of between 7 and 20 birds have been semi-resident from Flamborough to Norfolk.  This solo bird has been tentatively identified as one which seems to be an actual wild vagrant which has spent some time in Norfolk and seems now to have relocated to Lancashire on a stop off before moving north.  It’s a strange aspect of the hobby of birding that we won’t include animals that have flown hundreds of miles from Sweden or Holland to the UK because they’re not wild enough.  I understand why we have some rules about birds such as the recent Marbled Duck in Worcestershire which is highly unlikely to be wild, and about how recently these introduced birds can be classed as self-sustaining and wild, but I do find it interesting that people who officiously tell others they can’t “tick” Lesser White-fronts or Great Bustards are sometimes the people who have included Golden or Lady Amherst’s Pheasant on their lists – the very definition of introduced species that have never been self-sustaining or else why would they have inevitably died out?  Either way, if a bird has independently flown here from Sweden, who am I to declare it “out of bounds” for the bizarre game of UK listing?

Unimportant in this context, as the bird in Lancashire has decent credentials (despite every wildfowl sighting outside of Norfolk always having “of unknown origin” applied to it – as if we know the origin of 99% of the birds we watch…) and is most likely a “genuine” wild bird.  After locating the 3500ish Pink-footed Geese, I began to scan through the flock, eventually finding both the Lesser White and two Greater White-fronted Geese very distantly in the strong wind and punishingly direct sunlight.  Conditions made it difficult to get any footage of the bird, and even harder to direct others to find it, especially when the people asking for directions to the bird continually talked over instructions and questioned everything from my eyesight to my birding ability to my legitimacy of birth; though eventually a couple of other birders did get better optics on and confirm the two species.  It was interesting to compare them side by side, and note the extent of the white blaze on the forehead, along with the tiny beak on the Lesser. 

The flock of Pinks kept rotating through a pattern of land, feed, flight to the righthand side of the flock, move left while feeding, and this made searching through them to find a single Tundra Bean Goose challenging to say the least.  After two hours of scanning, one eye-strain, wind-burn on my poor, sensitive bald dome and on the verge of giving up and having a brew, one of the crowd shouted that he had found the Bean Goose at the very back of the herd.  I didn’t even attempt to find it in my own scope, and when he kindly offered me a look through his big old Swarovski lens it was with real relief that I could immediately see the difference between the Bean and the surrounding Pinks. 

There is a skill and a patience that people who regularly scan through geese flocks have that I just don’t think I can cultivate.  The people who patch across the Norfolk and Lancashire geese flocks that can number in the literal tens of thousands are remarkable in their dedication and their optical acuity.  For myself, the migraine I had that evening put me off scanning through geese for a while, and as I pondered whether to try for the Black Scoter off the Wirral, my poor eyes seemed to remind me that scanning through huge crowds of similar birds on distant seas is probably the only thing that hurts more than scanning through huge flocks of geese.

I have instead spent the week since patch watching, keeping an eye on the Long-eared Owl roost at a local undisclosed site and Hooded Crow that has moved from the Mosses to Cutacre, and seeing a build up of numbers of Gadwall, Grey Wagtail, Meadow Pipit and Skylark as spring does its best to force even the grey Manchester skies to lighten up a little.