When we arrived at the reserve today, all seemed peaceful with plenty of goldeneye & tufted duck out in front of East hide, with the majority of the mute swans. It was easy to see the teal, mallard and shoveler in front of Gullery hide as the geese have been doing an excellent job of grazing the islands down, giving the wildfowl a few less hiding places.
A quick hunt revealed the smew feeding close to one of the islands small between Gullery & East hides, along with a few goosander. A couple of coot were at the north edge of the loch too.
After a short time I began to hear geese, looked up and saw a flock of lapwing. My brain took a little while to compute the difference, but I soon found a few large skeins of geese becoming visible over the trees. As the classic formation broke up I realised our peace was about to be shattered. As the first couple of hundred settled more appeared, then more, then more. It was amazing to see and hear around 750 geese settle onto the water. Most of them were greylag geese, but there were just over 100 pink-footed geese in amongst. Unfortunately there was no sign of the barnacle goose or the collared greylag, both of which were around last week.
The collared greylag was wearing an orange collar with the letters CLZ, this is one of the birds we saw at Kinnordy last year, it was recorded in Ayrshire later in the winter. It was originally ringed in 2005, and has also been recorded in Iceland.
We didn't see any whooper swans today, but they are in the area, and a couple do drop in from time to time.