Winter water birds

It has been very cold for the past few days and the local ponds and lakes are frozen.  All, that is, apart from one end of Kilingworth Lake, a mile from here.  There the birds have manage to keep a patch of open water and there are hundreds of them crowded in.  I didn't get worthwhile photos of all of them but the birds I saw included black-headed gull, Canada goose, common gull, coot, gadwall, goldeneye, herring gull, little grebe, mallard, moorhen, mute swan, pochard, shoveler, and tufted duck.  They were all very close in and very hungry, so prepared to tolerate humans.  It was a great opportunity to see them close up and to take a few photos.

For example, it isn't often I see a goldeneye this close.

The most numerous duck was tufted duck.

I also saw a few male pochards.

And mallards.

The gadwalls weren't joining the party, preferring to take a nap on the ice.

Other partypoopers were shovelers.

I am used to seeing shovelers on the water but I hadn't realised how small they are until I saw this one next to a mallard.

Gulls present were black-headed gulls,

herring gulls,

and one first-winter common gull.

While I was watching several people brought food for the birds.  The swans and gulls in particular saw them coming and raced across to meet them.  The ducks, coots and geese joined in the scrum.

The thaw started today so the birds will be able to spread out across the lake again or disperse to nearby ponds and lakes.

Bird of the week - Scaup

The blog seems to have been taken over by trail cameras and mammals since the turn of the year so here is something different.  This handsome duck has been resident all winter on a municipal lake only a mile from here.   At first he was a bit difficult to pick out from all the tufted ducks but now he is coming into his finest breeding plumage. This is a male scaup, also known as a greater scaup, Aythya marila.

The scaup is a diving duck and makes a very energetic leap as it starts its dive.

The scaup is in the same genus as tufted duck and pochard.  It has a similar shape to a pochard and similar colouring to a tufted duck.  Here is the scaup with a tufted duck behind.

Thomas Bewick described the scaup in volume II of A History of British Birds (1832).

He wrote

John James Audubon painted a pair of greater scaups for Birds of America.

Archibald Thorburn also painted pictures of scaups, this one showing a female as well.

Other male ducks showing off their colours on the lake were goldeneyes,

tufted ducks,

pochards,

and mallards.

Scaups are uncommon winter visitors to the UK.  They breed in the arctic so this one will be heading north quite soon. Scaups also breed in Northern Canada and from there they migrate to the USA for winter.

Bird of the week - Tufted duck

The tufted duck (Aythya fuligula) is our commonest diving duck.

The male is especially handsome and, like so many "black and white" birds, has purple, green and blue colours in his feathers.  He even has a hipster hairstyle!

The population of tufted ducks increased markedly over 100 years ago after the colonisation of the UK by zebra mussels.  More recently numbers have been fairly stable.  This graph is from the BTO/JNCC/RSPB Breeding Bird Survey.

The BTO Bird Atlas distribution maps show that tufted ducks are widespread in much of England apart from the north west and south west, with fewer in Wales and Scotland.  Many of our winter tufted ducks are continental visitors.  The overwintering population is over 100,000 birds with fewer than 1 in 6 staying to breed.