A Great Northern Diver turned up at Farmoor Reservoir last Thursday, because of course it did: they always wait till they know I’m busy. I assumed that all the dinghy sailing, kite foiling and angling that goes on at Farmoor over the weekend would see it off before I could get to it, but the bird turns out to be made of sterner stuff than that, and it simply moved off the sporty F2 reservoir onto the smaller and quieter F1, where it’s said to have found a richly satisfying seam of invasive crayfish to mine.
When it was reported again at 10.30 this morning, I decided to pop over and see if I could use it to reverse my recent run of bad Diver luck. Which sort of happened, I think: this isn’t by any means the best photo I’ve ever taken of a Great Northern Diver, but it’s the best I’ve managed for a couple of years. Although a couple of people told me they’d see it earlier hunting quite close to the bank, it was about fifty metres away when I took this, and that was as close as it came during the time I managed to tolerate the vicious wind and biting windchill of Farmoor in pursuit of it.
My second photo tonight is a female Greater Scaup – number 107 on my bird list for the year (or 109, if I include the Hooded Merganser and White-headed Duck from St James Park, which is tempting but I think would be a bit on the cheeky side). I’ll be honest – she isn’t an especially impressive duck – especially when set against the male I saw at Farmoor a year or so ago – and on her own I definitely wouldn’t have driven forty miles just to see her. In fact she’s has been at Farmoor for a couple of months now without managing to tempt me into the car, but having gone today to further my wholly unrequited love affair with the Great Northern Diver, I was pleased to be offered this welcome bonus tick.
My third photo shows the most dramatic event of a surprisingly quiet visit: a Cormorant wrangling an enormous fish into submission. When I first saw them I couldn’t work out what was even happening – there appeared to be a massive fight going on in the shallows about a hundred metres away, which would resolve itself every few seconds into a black bird that would take off with enormous effort, before almost immediately crashing back into the water. For a short while I was consumed by the fantasy that it was the Cormorant that was being attacked, possibly even below the water line, but as I got closer I finally realised that the underdog in the fight was piscine rather than avian. I can report that – unlikely as it still seems to me now – the Cormorant did in the end manage to swallow the fish. And if it didn’t look very comfortable afterwards, swimming around for quite some time with its neck stretched vertically and its head held very high, that’s certainly less unpleasant than what was happening by then to its prey.
R: L2, C7, D11.
