Goldeneye

Keeping a bird list can be a funny thing. Birds that elude you one year can be everywhere the following one. A few years back I hadn’t seen a single Green Woodpecker all year until I visited RSPB and the Lodge just before Christmas. Outside the hide there was one resplendent individual working the leaf litter looking for food to sustain through the winter. I had got my final species tick of the year. About ten days later I was at Newport Wetlands to get that year’s list up and running. The first bird I encounter in Perry Lane, a Green Woodpecker searching the fringes of the brambles. It was also species number one on the 2014 list, when I looked bleary eyed out of the curtains on New Year’s Day to see one on my brother’s lawn.

Bearded Tits were much the same at Newport Wetlands. I didn’t see one for the first twelve months of visiting, after getting that particular monkey off my back I seemed to trip over them from there on in.

There was the Slimbridge Bittern a few years back. I read with envy on their twitter feed how the bird was showing well on a daily basis from the hide. I was determined to see this elusive heron. I travelled up to Gloucestershire about five times over that Christmas period. I sat and froze in the British Steel hide for hours, and was finally rewarded with seeing the bird in the reeds. It remained stubbornly elusive for photographic purposes, but I had finally added +1 to my life list. I always try to get to Newport Wetlands and Slimbridge in the first few weeks of each year, and I returned to the WWT reserve a week or so later and thought I would spend an hour in the hide to see if I could get a better view of the Bittern. This time it came out and may as well have tripped the light fandango in the glorious sunshine. I filled a memory card of photos in about half an hour!

I’ve just got back from another sojourn across the width of the UK to Lincolnshire. Whilst I was there at the start of autumn there was a pair of Goldeneye on the lagoon at Freiston Shore. I had nice views of them through the scope and the binoculars, but again they were frequenting the part of the lagoon by the seawall which was a little too far off to get any decent photos of them.

I quite like Goldeneye as they are another one of those species of bird that you can throw out some interesting useful factoids about. Everyone now associates the name with a James Bond film. Not everyone knows that the James Bond author Ian Fleming was a very keen ornithologist. In fact, 007’s name is taken directly from the author of Birds of the Caribbean. Ian Fleming was part of a team at British Naval Intelligence that worked on Operation Goldeneye during the World War II. Fleming’s estate in Jamaica is called Goldeneye (it was incidentally bought by Bob Marley after Fleming’s death), and so the bird that inspired the name of a covert operation in Spain, then became the name of his Caribbean retreat and inevitably inspired the title of the seventeenth Bond film (the first to feature Pierce Brosnan and Dame Judie Dench).

I have actually managed to see my first pair of Goldeneye at Newport Wetlands in the first week of January, which had been an excellent way to finish off the first day of birding of 2014, but it was a nice surprise to find about a dozen of them on the lagoon at Freiston when I arrived. Even better, they were right outside the hide. I sat and watched them for half an hour, and reeled off a few photos. There were about an equal mix of male and females. The males have a striking black and white body with blue/ green sheen to the head, and distinctive white “cheeks”. The female has a dowdier, mottled grey/ brown and white body, with a russet brown head, much like a Pochard. Both sexes of course have the bright golden eye from which they get their name. All the preening came to halt, and as I watched the males began displaying. I have only ever seen this with captive birds, so this was a real first for me. I managed to switch the camera to film mode and shot a minutes worth of video. I have attached it to this blog. It is handheld using the 500mm lens, so sorry for the occasional wobble. It’s an amazing bit of behaviour.

The day after we arrived in Lincolnshire, the Great Northern Diver that had frequented Freiston Shore left before I got to see it. If it follows the same pattern of all I have mentioned in this blog, I can only assume that my next visit there should feature at least four of these birds performing synchronised diving for me!

All images and video © Anthony Walton