Ducking and Diving

With a drake American Black Duck a stone’s throw away down at the Conwy Estuary, Stan Skelton and I headed down the A55 to try and catch a peak.

Arriving at RSPB Starbucks we were informed that the bird was last seen a little further down the river, mooching around a sandbank. Frustratingly when we rocked-up it had been flushed by a Ray Mears type out for a late afternoon paddle in his canoe and was consequently nowhere to be seen.

Still, it was hardly a chore to hang around for a while in this gloriously picturesque valley, especially when the local Buzzards and Ravens were up enjoying the thermals.

Speculating that the bird may have returned to the bay near the castle we decided to have one final punt from the footpath that runs around the RSPB reserve. After a blank thirty minutes SS persuaded me to have one final scan over a large number of waders, gulls and wildfowl behind the railway station. After some searching I picked up darkish duck feeding with a pair of Mallards. The bird looked compelling, but it wasn’t until the sun had started to fall thus improving the definition of the bird’s colouration that we could be satisfied it was the Black Duck!

Other interesting birds included a pair of mint Red-breasted Mergansers and plenty of Sand Martins noisily hawking insects over the lagoons.

On a completely unrelated thread – has anybody been following Kingfishergate on the North Wales forum? Personally, I find it astonishing that anybody could be so reckless as to put a picture of a Kingfisher’s nest on a website with the Scouse Alps’ most prominent landmark in the background – you could hardly provide more accurate directions to its location.

He then seems to try and hide behind legal ambiguity in order to justify his actions, but surely he has a moral obligation to ignore any urge he has to take photographs of the birds and err on the side of caution instead. However, I speculate that somebody dumb enough to reveal the nest’s location to all and sundry in the first place, maybe not the best person to exercise personal restraint and good judgement.

And now for something completely different – the benefits of photography! Ashley Cohen has sent me this picture of an Oystie with a warped bill. Minor mutations and distortions of birds’ bills are not uncommon, but peculiarly I saw a Curlew with precisely the same affliction at the same location – Greenfield – only a few weeks ago? Who’d have thunk it?

Until later.