Ducks, hen harriers and emergency landings!

BLOGGER:  Sean Locke, Reception Hide Volunteer

Sitting in the Reception Hide, watching wildlife and sharing it with the visitors I greet sounds easy right? Wrong! When you’re sitting in a freezing cold hide in the depth of winter wrapped up like an Eskimo, you’d have to be insane or really love volunteering to see wildlife and meet new people. I’m glad to say I’m the latter. My fingers and toes might have that frost-bitten feeling, but my passion for nature gets me through til the end of my shift.

You never know what will appear when you visit Strumpshaw at this time of year. Otters and kingfishers have given me the slip lately (with just one otter sighting for me so far this New Year) and even bitterns, which were seen very regularly on my shift this winter, have also started to elude me. So what do I watch out for while waiting for these three creatures? Ducks! Yep, ducks. Nothing wrong with that! The species that are showing themselves each week are beautiful. If you look at them closely and in the right light, the feathers of a gadwall are full of wonderful detail and the head of a teal is a dazzling colour show when the sun shines on it. This week, I had to look for two escapees for every visitor who wanted to see them. These were two female red-crested pochards which, unlike the bright headed males, are quite dull in comparison. Looking for two brown ducks among other brown ducks is like looking for needles in a haystack that also play ‘hide and seek’ by hiding behind the islands or tucking their head in their bodies for a nap or by diving.

Some days it feels like nothing is stirring but then something new and exciting turns up from nowhere. A few days before Christmas day, whilst watching an almost empty scene in front of the hide, a large harrier popped up from nowhere from the reed bed to my right. I thought it was one of our marsh harriers at first, but as it swooped closer and past us, I noticed a white patch near its tail (on its rump if you want to get technical). This was a female hen harrier, my first ever! It perched on top of a pile of reed cuttings. Her blazing yellow eyes that were attached to her owl-like face seemed to be staring right at me as I was gazing at her with my binoculars. She sat on the pile for a couple of minutes longer before taking off majestically and disappeared towards the Fen Hide. Best Christmas present ever!!

A single sighting of a hen harrier wasn’t the only highlight from my hide duties this winter; I’ve also seen surprising events. I arrived one morning to find that the Fen had frozen over. The lake in front of the Reception Hide was like an ice rink with just a few ice-free areas around the edges. A few mallards became ice skaters, slipping and sliding over towards the few areas to swim and feed. They weren’t the most graceful of skaters as they occasionally slipped over, making it hard for me not to laugh. For one member of a flock of mallards however, I couldn’t help but laugh as the flock were landing unaware that there was ice instead of water.  Most of them managed to evade making fools of themselves, but one of them slipped so far uncontrollably, that he nearly crashed into a reed bed. Who says winter is boring?