Leighton Moss Again!

Having spent the afternoon and evening in the library, perhaps now is a good opportunity to recount my latest trip to the wonderful woodland and wetland reserve at Leighton Moss on Tuesday. It was a lovely afternoon and not to be wasted on writing up notes, so the window in my schedule was put to use, and I headed back up to the Silverdale AONB and onto the reserve. Passerine activity around the feeders seemed a little quiet compared to last time but there were still plenty of great, blue and coal tits around.  I didn’t hang around too much and headed down to Lillian’s hide where I was greeted by a display of Swan behaviour.

Beautiful Whooper Swan.

A small party of seven or so Whooper Swans had arrived, presumably from Iceland, and looked perfectly at home on the lake. They do not usually winter here but I was advised they sometimes pass through. They were all beautiful, white adults with strong yellow markings on their bills, their smoothly sloping foreheads and straight necks setting them apart from the mute swans even from a distance. However, the resident pair of Mute Swans, the familiar orange-beaked swan of your local park lake, did not seem to be in thrall to the Nordic beauties, instead, they looked distinctly displeased. At first they kept their distance, but raised their wings and drew in their necks, in a threat posture, one that looked almost exaggerated. The aggression was palpable, but initially they seemed to be keeping their distance. They were heavily outnumbered, although individually distinctly larger than the ‘interlopers.’ The Whoopers, for their part, were largely unperturbed, ignoring the angry locals, but sticking close together. One of the mute swans drew closer, and the Whoopers edged slowly away. They may have only arrived that morning after the 18 hour, near transatlantic flight, and had every interest in conserving their energy, with an onward journey, perhaps to Martin Mere, but maybe considerably further afield, still ahead of them.  The mute swans herded the Whoopers into a corner, but one bird seemed determined not to be so restricted, and swam out past the Mute swans, separate from its party. The mute swan which seemed to be displaying the most aggression swam forward towards it, with his head down and his wings raised. The Whooper swam away slowly, nervously, but evidently it was not enough for the Mute swan, who proceeded to raise his wings and run across the water, flapping, toward the whooper, beak poised to grab at the back of the other bird. The Whooper took to the air and flew back to join its co specifics.

Aggressive mute swan.

Having  watched this display of behaviour I decided to persevere to the Greisdale hide, which had been off-limits due to rain on my previous visit. The view from here was gorgeous, with the autumn light shining off the glass-calm water, the leaves in the woodland opposite beginning to assume orange and brown shades, while other species remained green. A heron posed on a narrow spit of land while Teal and Widgeon rested peacefully among the reeds and sedges. The Widgeon seemed to be newly arrived seasonal visitors to me, as none were present last time. Mostly they seemed to be russet brown females and males still bearing some of their eclipse feathers.  There were a few Gadwall too, the females resembling smarter mallards, the males more monochrome ones. I sat for a while. Nothing happened except the place looked beautiful.

The view from the Tim Jackson hide.

I could have enjoyed this scene for some time but instead I headed around to the Tim Jackson hide, in the hope of perhaps seeing some more stuff. Deer were bellowing in the surrounding hills, and myself and the other people in the hide couldn’t help hoping that we might see, even photograph, one of the stags.  A Sparrowhawk flew through and put up some of the smaller birds, which had barely returned when a gorgeous female Marsh Harrier passed by and sent them all skyward again.   A small group of swans flew in, and these, it turned out, were the whoopers again. They sat in the water in front of us, someone in the hide describing these beautiful and fairly uncommon passage migrants as the “bird of the day.” They didn’t stay long, the marauding Mute Swans following them, and eventually persuading them skyward and they flew out toward Morecambe Bay.

Handsome Grey Heron at Leighton Moss.

The light was beginning to fade and I was wondering about getting back toward home before I’d have to drive in the dark. I decided to give these deer a couple more minutes, as the bellowing continued and sounded, although I have little experience, like it was coming closer. I had been sitting there a while, talking about swans and deer with the other stragglers still in the hide, enjoying the gentle chatter of birdy people and the distant bellows, watching one of the keepers in the wooded estate opposite feeding the pheasants, and sitting around, when a few of the birds to my right took to the air. They quickly settled as they reached the far bank; when put to flight by an avian predator, ducks usually stay airborne until the predator is out of sight, but these ones did not stay up long. Whatever had scared them was clearly terrestrial. I looked out in the direction from which the panicked ducks, the bulk of them teal, until recently sleeping soundly, and was rewarded with my first glimpse of a wild, English otter in fresh water!   It wasn’t as big as the beast I saw off the coast of Skye a couple of years ago, so I can only assume it was a juvenile, but it was a sleek, dark, wet creature, long and low to the ground. It seemed to be aware of the commotion it caused in the hide, probably on account of the noises we made, and plunged into the water and away before I could get a photo,  but what a beautiful beast! And what a first!

Scruffy, moulting Teal at Leighton Moss.

I waited a little while for the deer. I managed to confirm how close they were when I realised some of the reeds I could see were not reeds, but the points of the antlers of one of the noisy stags, and several of us waited, with bated breath, it seemed, for the beast to appear and pose for a photo. Inevitably he never did, but by the antlers, which must have had ten points, and rose up above the Phragmites which stood as tall as a man, he was huge.  I contented myself with enjoying the strange noises he was making, watching the birds making their way toward roosting sites against the backdrop of the autumnal woods. Cormorants gathered in a tree in front of me, and a couple of little egrets and a lapwing were among those flying through the sunset. 



It is that time of year, the time the season is changing. I saw no hirundines at Leighton Moss but I did see a small crowd of swallows flying over Freeman’s Pools in Lancaster on Saturday, even as the place was beginning to fill with Teal and other wintering ducks. The previous day I’d watched my first pair of fieldfares of the season, flying, making their “tseeptseep” contact calls as they flew overhead.  With the Whooper Swans at Leighton Moss, it is the time of year when birds are on the move and anything can still turn up anywhere.