Cold weather flushes bitterns & water rails
Notes and photos from a walk on Jan 15 2013
The cold weather has emboldened reclusive wildfowl like bitterns and water rails, exposed by their need to feed to stay warm as temperatures drop below zero at night. For the past few days there has been bittern sightings at the Scrape hide and the Sand Martin hide. Secretive bitterns are camouflaged by buff-coloured feathers, streaked to resemble the reedbed they haunt. More cold weather is forecast so we hope to see the flock of 20+ Bewick's Swans in the Arun Valley come back in to roost at WWT Arundel one evening soon.
A female peregrine is flying over the reserve towards the Offham hangar with a lapwing in her claws. The male is perched in a tree near the forked beech that sticks out above the line of the hangar. The buzzard flying above the reserve is the first one I have seen in a few weeks.
I see an Egyptian goose from the Ramsar hide. Egyptian geese were brought to the UK and bred in captivity. The geese have gone feral after escaping, finding others and breeding until the species is becoming commonplace. This mirrors what happened with Mandarin ducks brought over from China in the Victorian era.
From the Ramsar hide I count five cormorants on the island. Two herring gulls and a great black-backed gull mix with a large group of black headed gulls. There are 23 shelducks and 10 gadwall but I can see only 1 lapwing. Perhaps the peregrine drove them off. There is also only one wigeon and one snipe visible so I move to the Sand Martin hide for a better angle. From this hide I see 7 more snipe feeding along the edges, spot two female wigeon and see a grey heron fishing in the back water.
At the Scrape hide I surprise a water rail in the reeds directly under the windows. A heron lands in the reeds to the left and flushes 40 teal into the air! I scan the edges of the reeds for bittern with my binoculars. Instead I find 6 snipe on the edge of the fen and a bright kingfisher perched above them on a post. A cormorant fishes the scrape serenaded by a Cetti's warbler in the willows to the right. At the Reedbed hide I see another water rail in the clearing to the left of the hide.
