Winter wonderland

The new year is still going well. Lots of year ticks so far albeit without any really juicy rarities. Not even a sniff of a lifer anywhere with 5 hours drive (Northumberland and Penzance being outside this radius for a black scoter and a pacific diver respectively!). Still, another nice day meant I was out again to see the list ticking over. This trip was to Welney for the winter swans and hopefully a few other juice morsels.
I got there about 30 minutes after dawn to a typical fen day - misty! The centre doesn't open early so I had a quick trip out into the fields. There were lots of swans around feeding happily, virtually all of them whoopers or mutes though.

The whoopers, together with their less common cousins the Bewick's, are our winter swans. Arriving here in November time they feed up in the fields around Welney before leaving in early Spring for their nesting grounds in Iceland and Siberia respectively. In recent years Bewick's have become much less common. It is thought that this is due to climate change meaning Winters are warmer in Europe and they "short-stop" on the near continent rather than extending their journeys to the UK. Anyway, a good tick before I had even got to the centre. The car park has a good population of tree  sparrows who were chirping away happily in the weak sun - tick!!!
The view from the main observatory is always spectacular. The cold night and the frost on the water had held some of the swans nearer for longer giving a noisy greeting to the few visitors as it opened.

Most of the swans near to the centre are the whoopers though you could see a flock of 20 or 30 Bewick's right at the far side of the reserve. They are smaller and more delicate even at that distance. Otherwise it was virtually the complete set of ducks and geese including white-fronted geese and one of my favourite ducks, the pintail. There had been 3 tundra bean geese reported but myself and 3 others failed to find them in the greylag flock so that was one dip for the morning.
On the way out though I had two surprises. First, and not a total surprise, was a lone cattle egret feeding in the river by the bridge. The second almost caused me to do a Prince Phillip. I had packed up my gear and was heading out down the road when a shape on a fence post caught my eye. A white shape turned its head and glared at me as I passed. To the sound of screeching brakes I slammed the car into the nearest pull in as a barn owl floated past me along the fence line. Of course, my camera was on the back seat, with the wrong lens and settings!! A frantic 30 seconds and a certain amount of cursing later and I managed to catch get out as another passing car spooked it out of the grass and it settled on a post near by.

For 10 minutes I followed it as it hunted the verges but even the small amount of passing traffic meant it never settled and eventually it flopped over the bank onto the reserve. Barn owls are not easy to see nowadays so this was a bonus.
My final stop was back to Holme Fen near Peterborough. Before Xmas I had a long-staying juvenile rough-legged buzzard there. It is still hunting the scrubby fields but over a very wide area. It took me over 2 hours to track it down as I walked and drove up and down the fen road. Probably the most remarkable thing was the number of kites around there. You could see 8 or 10 in the air at any time. Eventually I got the RLB though.

 This is a really bad shot but it was miles away. You can see its distinguishing feature though, the white rump. It hunted the far-side of the fields for 10 minutes before drifting off out of sight again.
Still, another good day, 6 year ticks with some good birds in there and pretty nice weather to go with it. That takes me to 143 with my target of 150 by the end of the month very achievable.