Trip at the Cotswold Water Park

Today's tour was an afternoon walk around the Cotswold Water Park (CWP) looking for winter duck. The trip went very well with a full house of what is available at present - smew, goosander, teal, pintail, shoveler, teal, gadwall, wigeon, red-crested pochard, pochard, tufted duck, mallard, goldeneye and shelduck. The weather was great too as you can see in this picture of three smew.

Besides the smew, another bird a lot of people want to see at CWP on a winter trip is red-crested pochard, having originally escaped from a nearby wildfowl collection in the 1970, the numbers are thought to be in excess of 300 now, we saw around 100 today. Here's a picture of a rather dapper male.

At one of the sites we were lucky enough to watch shovelers displaying and generally chatting away to each other from about 20 metres away - brilliant!

Other species identified today included green sandpiper, chiffchaff, kingfisher, water rail, sparrowhawk and cetti's warbler. In total we saw 54 species, a great total for a winter's afternoon in Wiltshire! (NA)