Elton Reservoir

Juvenile grey wagtail

I thought I'd best make a visit to Elton Reservoir to break the voodoo before I start getting superstitious about it.

I got there midday and decided to walk the Southern bank of the reservoir so I wasn't just seeing a horde of silhouettes. At first sight there wasn't much about, an easy mistake to make when there's plenty about but it's dispersed thinly and evenly over a whole reservoir.

Juvenile cormorant

Male tufted duck

There were more than a hundred black-headed gulls, mostly in small groups of half a dozen or so. There might have been that many teal, too, the whole North shore had small groups of them dabbling at the water's edge and there were nearly as many coots scattered about on the water in ones and twos. The supporting cast included a couple of dozen each of great crested grebes and cormorants, a few dozen tufted ducks, a couple of dabchicks and a couple of grey wagtails.

Juvenile dabchicks

Juvenile grey wagtail

Juvenile grey wagtail

A few dozen large gulls loafing midwater were mostly lesser black-backs with some herring gulls. Even in a group of this size there was a wide scope for confusion, not only with the variety of plumages due to age and moult but also size and shape: there were a couple of big brutes of adult males, including a beefy herring gull approaching great black-back size, and some dainty-looking female birds including some rather prettily proportioned juveniles.

Female first-Winter lesser black-back

This time of year I'm always on the lookout for any birds that look almost-but-not-quite as they might turn out to be something unusual. The downside to this is a lot of false alarms. I prepare for this automatically when I'm looking at gulls, I forget to do so with other birds. That sandy looking teal was just a sandy looking teal, slightly paler than the others to begin with and looking paler due to a trick of the light. That pale-backed diving duck with the black head was a tufted lying on its back scratching its belly. And so was the one at the other end of the reservoir.

And then there was the white bird with the Canada geese on the field by the reservoir. It was almost the same size as the Canada geese, too small and quite the wrong shape for a white farmyard goose. It had its head down and I couldn't see the shape of its head or bill so it had me puzzled. It was vanishingly unlikely to be a snow goose, what would it be doing with a random bunch of Canada geese this time of year? (in the Northwest any stray snow geese will have nearly always tagged along with migrating pink-footed geese). Definitely not a Ross' goose, they're very compact little things. I was eventually saved when the bird in question lifted its head and showed a typical bright orange duck's bill. It was quite the biggest proper Aylesbury duck I've seen in years.

Aylesbury duck and Canada geese

There had been a ruddy duck reported on the reservoir over the weekend. There was no sign of it today, it had probably moved on. Not surprising with the shoot to kill policy still being the case.

I had a quick look at Withins Reservoir which looked quiet and turned out to be even quieter, just a lone tufted duck and a cormorant. I'd been hearing martins, it turned out to be a small flock of house martins feeding over the stables.

I'd successfully removed the jinx from the place and had a decent wander round with no alarums or excursions. It was definitely an Autumn walk and there was nothing the migrant hawkers and red admirals flitting about the reservoirs could do to say otherwise. I headed off down the path towards St Andrew's Road for the bus, the hedgerow busy with long-tailed tits and great tits.

Elton Reservoir