Trip reports

Wraysbury

Graham Cole

Sunday, 15 January 2012

There are some days when going bird watching can be tuff. You know that there should be great birds around, but you spend all day working hard to get no more than a fleeting glimpse of something departing at great speed. On the other hand you can get a day like our trip to Wraysbury. For starters the sun was shining on a clear crisp day providing excellent light for viewing. Our first sightings were of some siskins. A flock of at least 50 birds flew away from the trees. There were a few goldeneyes on the first lake, along with mute swan, tufted duck, coot, moorhen and a grey heron. The best sighting was a flock of 8 goosander. There were 4 males and 4 females. A splendid drake smew flew in to land nearby. As we continued there were several fieldfares and redwings in the trees along the path. There were also green and great spotted woodpeckers. After a while we found a small group of birds feeding on silver birch cones. Unfortunately they were silhouetted against the sun. So we had to sneak past the tree to look back at wonderful redpolls. After such a successful morning we headed off to Staines Reservoir for the afternoon. Here the two basins were populated with tufted duck, teal, goldeneye, cormorant, black-headed gull and great crested grebe. As we made our way to the far end of the causeway we began to find other birds. We found mallard, wigeon, shoveler and pochard. There were several wigeon feeding on the grass above the north basin apparently unconcerned by a nearby fox, which settled in for a snooze. Pied wagtails were feeding along the water's edge. Herring , common and a great black-backed gull were all present. The North Basin water level was much lower than we had seen before. At the far end we met some other birders who had located the shag on one of the rafts. Little grebes were present and we were also shown a female scaup and then a bit later a male scaup. It was nice to have the opportunity to compare these rare birds with the more common tufted ducks.