Welney and the Ouse Washes - 7/1/2019

In the Cambridgeshire fens, an area so intensively farmed it has as much wildlife as the Sahara, is one of the country's greatest spectacles. For in a small strip of land half a mile wide and twenty miles long is one of the greatest concentrations of wintering wildfowl in the country. We're not talking about thousands of birds, but many tens of thousands, in many cases of just one species. Welcome to the Ouse Washes.

Male POCHARD - common on the deeper water in front of the main obs

 



This was a great birding opportunity and for me this was the first major bird watching sessions of the new year, away from the local patch. Year listing is an activity that pretty much every bird watcher does, even if half heartedly, and it can be summed up as keeping a list of all the bird species seen in a calendar year. The really serious birder, or twitcher usually aims to get over 300, while the more general birder, such as myself, usually sticks to around 200, which, when you think of it, is still a lot. The Ouse Washes are a great place for seeing different species throughout the year, and I got this year off to good start, seeing a lot of birds.
The northern part of the Ouse Washes is owned by the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust, and they have created a really full on birding experience, with a large café and a heated observatory, providing some of the best facilities for any bird reserve in the world. In a sense it brings the birds to you rather than the other way round. This takes away all that hardship that usually entails in finding birds.
The main observatory was the main port of call. It is heated with comfy chairs and big windows looking out onto the reserve, a watery wonderland, throbbing with birds.

The observatory looking out on the SWAN FEED

 



I found it a bit of a cheat. Birdwatching should be about freezing your arse off in a cold hide, with the birds a mile off, a distant spec in the telescope. But here the birds are right up close to the observatory, in many cases just a couple of metres away. POCHARD like the deeper water immediately in front of the obs, with two species of SWAN present, the MUTE and the WHOOPER both large birds, attracted to this reserve in their thousands.
There is some controversy with Welney, and that's the SWAN FEEDING. Its an event where a man goes out front of the obs and throws out grain to attract the SWANS (which are wild) to come right out in front, so people like me can gawp at them and take photos. In many ways its like a zoo, but also it makes wildlife accessible, and most of the time wildlife isn't, to people unable to go out and find it.

The SWAN FEED - the birds were literally feeding out of the wheelbarrow

 

Star species of the day was a RING NECKED DUCK, a transatlantic species, which having accidently arrived here has no way to get back across the ocean, a bird that is doomed to wander the wetlands of the UK for the rest of its life all alone. Also present from Chile, so is most likely to be an escape from a private collection, was a RINGED TEAL, which was a lovely little bird.

Most of the Ouse Washes was flooded, like a giant lake, with raised banks providing islands for roosting birds. Large numbers of GODWITS were about, with small numbers of other WADERS - REDSHANK, DUNLIN, SNIPE and RUFF, worth the effort of finding them.
Unusually, because there isn't much grass to attract them, there was a large variety of GEESE. Fifty PINK FOOTED GEESE, flew in and although common in coastal Norfolk are quite rare this far inland. Three WHITE FRONTED GEESE were present and a single BARNACLE also adding to the diversity.
A female MARSH HARRIER was seen quartering distantly over the other side, occasionally putting wildfowl into the air.

A RINGED TEAL - an escape from someone's wildfowl collection

 



Away from the main obs there were several hides and out in the more wilder areas of the reserve. The main DUCK species out on the reserve was the WIGEON, and there were thousands of them, but they were also supported by large numbers of TEAL and PINTAIL, the latter a reserve speciality, you often don't get them together in such large numbers.
The furthest hide provided the biggest spectacle. Here there were still areas of grassland just about still present above the flood, and this provided the best habitat for feeding DUCKS. Also here was the third species of SWAN the BEWICK'S. This SWAN is undergoing quite a lot of difficulty at the moment, with the bird arriving in this country in very small numbers, with the species rare even here. The problems are never easy to solve, and like a lot of "British" birds a large part of their lives are led outside the country and is the case with a lot of our birds its an international problem to solve.
The skies around the furthest edges of the reserve were whirling with huge numbers of LAPWING and GOLDEN PLOVERS, creating clouds that would twist and turn and throb, formed of many thousands of birds. It was truly an amazing spectacle and just shows the possibilities - if you create and protect reserves the birds will come.
I spent quite some time here and it was worth it, I saw a lot, and for a bird reserve, was quite a sociable place. I still had some time left so I decided to visit the other reserve on the Ouse Washes, one owned by the RSPB.

RSPB Ouse Washes
Being rather more low key than the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust reserve at Welney, people don't often realise the RSPB reserve is much bigger. It has a small car park, a little visitor's centre, but crucially lots of hides, the cold wooden ones, not anything heated.
The reserve is similar to Welney, with perhaps more trees, but is made up of flooded grassland. The sheer number of birds is also the same. To look out of a hide and see the many thousands of birds is so overwhelming, I mean searching through all of that to find something unusual can be a tall order. Annoyingly, most of the birds on the RSPB reserve were on the other side of the washes which made birding all the more difficult.
I only had an hour here before the light became too poor to see anything. It was pretty much the same species as at Welney, with the exception of a male GOLDENEYE, and a KINGFISHER that whizzed by, seen funnily enough from the Kingfisher Hide.

WHOOPER SWAN

 



Well there really was a lot at the Ouse Washes, both in quantity and quality, it really is a great bird reserve, easily one of the best in the country. If you have any spare time over the next couple of months its worth a look for the sheer spectacle, but being a great reserve it is worth a look at any time. Its just a shame its surrounded by a dead zone of intensive farming, as is so common of a lot of reserves, big and small they are often isolated jewels in a harsh landscape of factory farming. The way it is at the moment, wildlife has only a toe hold in the countryside strange as that may seem. I look forward to a time when the countryside is worked in a more enlightened way.