Whooper Swans

-

 We don't see whooper swans except when they are in transit and fly over. I have seen a couple of small flocks this Autumn and thought them worth featuring. My photographs come from a visit a couple of years ago to the Wetland Trust reserve Caerlaverock just over the border in Scotland on the Solway coast.



Whooper swans have very distinct bright yellow patches on their beaks. The patination is distinct and can be used to recognise individual birds. Whooper swans are distinct from our resident mute swans which have a more orange beak and have an obvious black knob on their foreheads. The only bird that a whooper swan might be confused with is the rather slighter Bewick's swan which have shorter necks and rather less yellow on their beaks. I have never observed Bewick's swans near here.
Whooper swans are winter visitors to this part of the world. The UK birds tend to spend their summers in Iceland and breed on the tundra. (The Bewick swans come from Siberia). Whooper swans have a loud honking call  Whooper swans tend to overwinter in estuaries and marsh land.
When I was at Caerlaverock I was fortunate to photograph a rare occurrence when I spotted a bird without webbed feet. This is most unusual and is probably a genetic deficiency. You will see this in the photo where one bird has webbed feet and one doesn't



Diary
We had the first proper frost of the winter yesterday with the frost lasting to mid afternoon. We also had some sleet but no lying snow. Overnight cameras showed wood mice and a roe deer along with the usual rabbits. One of the red squirrels that visit our feeders appears to have a damaged (broken?) hind leg. It is still feeding on the ground but has difficulty climbing. Not a great prognosis for a squirrel. There  seems to little we can do for it as we don't have a trap but we are monitoring the situation.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Dunnock

-
Image
 When I was a boy my first bird book described "hedge sparrows" but at some time in the last 50 years this name has all but disappeared and these birds are now called dunnocks (as they are not closely related to House and Tree Sparrows) Its easy to miss a dunnock! They are little brown birds and they tend to feed on the ground and keep to the cover of vegetation if they can. The males are territorial and the birds pair up in the spring. The pair are not strictly monogamous and the female will mate with another male if she gets the chance. DNA testing reveals that a brood often has more than one father. The male dunnocks are alert to this possibility and can sometimes be seen pecking at the cloacal opening of the female in an attempt to get her to expel the sperm of the competitor. The sexes look alike and these birds are common and widespread in Britain. The males get involved in feeding young according to their breeding success so it is common to find two males and one femal...
Read more

White Clawed Crayfish

-
Image
 I went for a walk yesterday that took me along the Scandal Beck (a tributary of the River Eden). On the banks of the river was a stone that had obviously been used as a picnic table by an otter and the remains of his meal were strewn about. A recognisable part of the leftovers is shown below. It's clear that this claw comes from a white clawed crayfish. These animals are not common in the UK as they need the water to be rich in calcium. This requirement is fulfilled in the Eden valley by the limestone substrate. I think that the River Eden is as far North as theses animals get. I know that there are crayfish in this part of the system because for a number of years I have volunteered with the Eden Rivers Trust to survey them. It was not uncommon to find a couple of hundred animals in a 300m stretch of river. The following images give an indication of scale. In recent years the population of the native white clawed crayfish has been threatened by the arrival of the invasive signal (...
Read more

Otters

-
 Well another Covid lockdown! As I am confined to the local area I have been having a closer look at the local wildlife. I treated myself to a trail cam and started to see what I could find. After a couple of experimental sessions to get to know the kit I set the camera along a fence line by an old railway track. On the first night I was astonished to get footage of an otter carrying a rabbit! The site is at least 500m from a watercourse which is a drainage ditch that eventually flows into a tiny tributary of the River Eden I hadn't realised that otters eat anything other than fish but apparently they do. I wonder why the otter was carrying the rabbit rather than eating it where it was found. Perhaps it was feeding young? Apparently ottters have young throughout the year. I have only seen an otter near the house once before and that was a late night encounter in the car headlights.
Read more