Ring-necked duck

Female ring-necked duck, Alexandra Park

A very windy night and was followed by a breezy morning so the birds in the garden were hugging the cover, except the blackcap which seems to be permanently glued to the fat feeder today.

The winds had brought a pile of gulls into the school playing field though no lesser black-backs and just the one common gull.

• Black-headed Gull 68
• Common Gull 1
• Feral Pigeon 1
• Herring Gull 18,  including 3 adults, 3 4th-winters, 1 3rd-winter, 2 2nd-winters, 7 1st-winters
• Jackdaw 15
• Magpie 2
• Rook 5
• Starling 2
• Woodpigeon 15

There had been reports of a ring-necked duck at Alexandra Park yesterday and as it's within lockdown exercise distance (but only just!) I decided I'd go over and see if it stayed the night. It took a while to get to Alexandra Park. Along the way I noticed that there were a lot fewer pigeons in Stretford town centre than usual: there's generally more than fifty kicking about and this morning there was only twenty-nine (slightly better on the way back: forty-seven). 

Ring-necked duck and tufted ducks, Alexandra Park

There were plenty of tufted ducks on the lake at Alexandra Park so I got my eye in on those before trying to find the ring-necked duck. I've never seen a female before so I wanted to fix the tufties in my mind before trying to pick it out. As it happened I needn't have worried, the bird was most unlike any plumage of tufted duck and had a rather pochard-like look about it. The conspicuous pale spectacles formed by the eye ring and eye stripe suggest that it's a first-Winter bird (I'm not being clever, I looked it up).

Female ring-necked duck, Alexandra Park

Female ring-necked duck, Alexandra Park

The thing that made both this bird and the drake that spends its Winters on Pine Lake stand out amongst the crowd for me was the size of the bill, It might be an optical illusion caused by the pale subterminal band and the huge black nail at the end, it might be because it looks like a continuation of the slope of the forehead. It certainly looks longer and more spade-shaped than the tufties' bills do.

Female tufted duck, Alexandra Park

A pair of herons were making a racket on the nest on the island in the middle of the lake while a third loafed down on the ground looking a bit sorry for itself and a pair of ring-necked parakeets wheeled around in a typically demented fashion. Walking up towards the Claremont Road end of the park I noticed there were a lot of goldfinches still managing to find pickings from the birches and alders along the path.

A long wheel back through Whalley Range and Old Trafford took me to White City where I did a week's shopping and got a lazy bus home. Along the way it struck me that I was seeing far more goldfinches than house sparrows.