A surprise visitor was spotted at North Warren on Wednesday. Grazing among the hundreds of wigeons on South Marsh was one of their cousins from across the Atlantic. American wigeons are scarce visitors tot he UK. A few turn up every winter, among their European cousins. Some of these return to the same place year after year, presumably migrating east to Siberia with the European wigeons, rather than trying to relocated west across the ocean. However, it's a few years since we've seen one at any of our Suffolk coast reserves.
American wigeons are the same size and shape as our wigeons but they lack the pink breast or chestnut and cream head. Instead their head is mainly creamy-white, speckled darker on the cheeks, with a prominent bottle green patch around and behind the eye. The body plumage is pinker, rather than grey. However, they can be very difficult to spot among several hundred other ducks and geese as they graze in the tussocky grass, or loaf around at the edge of the pools. These ducks include teals, shovelers, pintails and shelducks, as the plentiful wigeons.
I tried unsuccessfully to find this lovely duck this morning, but as it was snowing quite hard at the time I probably gave up a bit too easily. It was certainly showing well this afternoon. I hope it stays long enough for me to try again in a couple of weeks when I next have a guided walk at North Warren.
The tundra bean geese were present first thing this morning before flying south to feed. There was, however, a large flock of dark-bellied brent geese on South Marsh. Interestingly, with much of the open water frozen, both pochard and tufted duck, as well as little grebe, were diving in the few open patches of shallow water.