As forecast, this morning dawned cloudy and windy, with rain threatening but the skies were clearing by the time I reached Aldeburgh to welcome ten visitors who were joinng me on the first of this winter's three Winter Wildfowl guided walks at North Warren. It was great to see several familiar faces among the crowd, including Steve and Angela who used to run the nearby Blaxhall Youth Hostel but were returning to Suffolk on holiday from Scotland. I met them at Minsmere on Thursday, where they admitted to having brought the wet weather with them from the Isle of Arran. We need the rain, but we could have done without the wind this morning as the ducks and geese tend to stay low when the wind whistles across North Warren's marshes.
Thankfully, while the wind was to prove a bit of nuisance, it was at least a westerly, with temperatures remaining much more bearable than those associated with easterly or northerly winds. The sun valliantly battled through at times, highlighting the vivid colours of the ducks and resulting in a shimmering rainbow arching across the northern sky. We did, however get caught by a particularly squally shower as we began to head back towards our cars!
As ever at this time of year, the marshes were packed full of ducks, although unusually they were all clustered onto the pools and islands. Clearly the wind was a factor in detering the wigeons from grazing on the adjacent fields, but a bigger issue was the presence of two female marsh harriers constantly quartering the marshes. With each flypast, flocks of ducks would dash from the sheltered banks to the safety of the pools, while waders would wheel around before dropping back to feed or roost around the water's edge.
Among the ducks, wigeons were as expected the most numerous, with many teals hiding alongside their larger cousins. There are excellent numbers of elegant pintails at North Warren this winter, while shovelers, gadwalls and mallards mixed freely in the throng.
Lapwings were the most numerous waders, but up to 300 black-tailed godwits and 200 dunlins swirled around North Marsh in flickering flocks and several curlews strutted through the grass, probing casually for worms. At least one ruff hid among the lapwings, being seen only when the flock flew. There were several hundred starlings among the lapwings too - presumably part of the flock that is roosting in the reedbed here. There were two little egrets on South Marsh too.
North Warren is perhaps best known in winter for its geese, but these were not performing today. We did have excellent views of several very close flocks of barnacle geese, sheltering close to the old railway path, but there were fewer greylag and Canada geese (all feral geese) than normal and the only "wild" goose was a lone brent on South Marsh. There have been up to 350 white-fronted geese at North Warren recently, but they were obviously feeding elsewhere today - perhaps at Sudbourne or Hazelwood Marshes on the Alde Estuary. This is not unusual behaviour when it's windy at North Warren. The tundra bean geese seem to favouring Minsmere this year, with few sightings at their usual stomping ground of North Warren. Perhaps they'll come back in time for my remaining two walks on 4 and 18 February.
Marsh harriers weren't the only predators seen. A fox patrolled stealthily around one of the drier fields in search of rabbits, and a gorgeous male kestrel posed in a nearby pine beofre giving several examples of how to hang in the air, head into the wind, wingtips barely twitching as it searched for hapless vole or mouse. A peregrine has been regular at North Warren recently, but we didn't manage to see it today.
With the wind, it was not surprising that, starlings apart, small birds were limited to a calling skylark and a single meadow pipit on the marshes, a few blue tits and great tits in song along the railway line, and a flock of chaffinches and linnets in fields west of South Marsh.
Gadwall (below) by Jon Evans