“I don’t suppose you’ve seen the Great Northern Diver, have you?” I asked the guy scanning the reservoir off Draycote Bank with a large camera. “Is there a Great Northern Diver here?” he replied. “I hadn’t heard.”
“No”, in other words.
It was always a long shot, to be fair – a dark grey-brown bird that spends most of its awake time under the water, and sits low down in it even when up at the surface, was always going to be hard to find on a large expanse of grey reservoir under heavy cloud. But the weather forecast for Draycote today had been better than for any of the other places to which I’d thought of going, and I have had good GND photos there previously, so I’d thought it was worth a punt. Severn Trent Water is doing yet more work at Draycote, and Toft Bank, from which all my best Diver shots have been taken, is currently inaccessible, but reports had placed the current bird down near the Valve Tower, which on a decent afternoon can offer lovely light and nice images. Today though, the north-west corner had neither light nor Diver, and images of anything at all were hard to get.
“Perhaps you can tell me something,” said my uninformant. “Are any of these the Red-breasted Mergansers?” I cast a rapid eye over the small group of Goosanders in front of us, just to be sure, though in fact I already knew the answer, having photographed his quarry several minutes earlier. “No, I said, “these are all Common. The Red-breasted are both back there, between the stand of trees and the corner.” “Great!” he said. “How can I recognise them?” Finding myself in the unusual (and unlikely) situation of someone thinking I know more about any kind of bird than they do, I hesitated – but it’s actually not that hard, so I said, “When you see them, I think you’ll know. They have a straighter bill, with brighter lipstick, and a gingery head with a bit of an eye stripe. They just look… girlier than these.”
He laughed, a bit doubtfully to be honest, and we said goodbye and went our separate ways. Forty minutes later, when I gave up my search for the Great Northern Diver and headed back towards the visitor centre and the car park, he was standing on the southernmost section of Draycote Bank photographing the Red-breasted Mergansers, and explaining to someone else how to spot them. When he saw me, he said, “Thank you! You were absolutely right – once you get your eye in, they do look quite different.” I’m thinking of embroidering this on a sampler, and hanging it over my desk – but for now I’ll just invite you to see if you agree, by comparing the main image of a Red-breasted Merganser with my second photo, which is a red-head Goosander.
On my way home I stopped off at Waitrose in Stratford, to collect the air-fryer I seem to have ordered from John Lewis yesterday, after R pointed out that it was reduced by £70 in the Black Friday sale. As I despise Black Friday, hate cooking, and don’t know where I’m going to find space in the kitchen to put the flipping thing, I’m convinced that someone else must have taken over my brain and committed this egregious act of impulse buying on my behalf. When I find out who it was, I’ll be having a stiff word with them.
R: L2, C1, D5.
