The Mandarins of Kent

Much has been said about the damaging impacts of non-native species in the British Isles, and this publicity has been largely negative, from Canada Geese causing eutrophication of lakes with their droppings, to invasions of Japanese Knotweed and Giant Hogweed. The potential ecological risks posed by the now-familiar Ring Necked Parakeet (Psittacula krameri), noisy, shy and gorgeous, is currently However, it is worth approaching any conversation about invasive species with a degree of caution, as many species are now long-established in Britain, including the charismatic and declining Little Owl (Athene noctua), friend of farmers and nemesis of a range of agricultural pests, and the stunningly beautiful Mandarin Duck (Aix galericulata) and do not have any appreciable negative impacts.

Mandarins at Keston Ponds, Greater London. Note the enormous carp in the foreground, which scared the apparently previously oblivious ducks skyward a second later!

 

The Mandarin Duck originates from far Eastern Asia, occurring in Eastern Russia,  Japan, and most notably China. It was relentlessly collected in the latter and exported to ponds all over the World, all the while suffering reductions in its unique habitat, and is now a relatively scarce bird there, although newly discovered wild populations have bolstered its conservation status. Among the birds torn from their natural habit, were small numbers brought to ornamental lakes in Britain. They were first recorded breeding wild in the UK in London in 1946, although breeding populations were probably established much earlier.  They are now found at a small number of sites, largely concentrated in South Eastern England, although a few individuals occur at Mere Sands Wood, a wonderful woodland and wetland reserve somewhere between Preston and Liverpool, and managed by Lancashire Wildlife Trust.  Prior to the discovery of new populations in China, the British population of Mandarins in the 1990s was thought to exceed that in its native range, although in reality it may represent  10-20% of it (LNHS 2002).  This non-native population remains, far from a parochial conservation threat, a global conservation asset. Their UK strongholds are in Greater London, Berkshire and Surrey.

Among the abandoned bread. Bread is not good for birds, and incidentally, Keston Ponds was covered in floating bits of it. Please, if you can refrain from bread-throwing without upsetting yourself or your kids, do so.

Mandarin Ducks have been under-recorded in the UK due to their secretive, tree-nesting habits. Unusually for the typically chauvinistic duck family, males and females share the incubation of the eggs. Perhaps as hole nesters the male’s incredibly bold plumage represents less of a liability in terms of predation risk. The males have distinctive orange feathers on their faces, red bills, and large, orange sail-like plumage on their backs. Electric blue flashes can be seen on their backs and flanks.  While the female is less gaudy, smart in a uniform grey-brown with white underside markings and a white stripe around her big, dark eyes, she may command the prize for cutest-looking female duck, perhaps competing with the scarce, and also introduced, Carolina Wood Duck from the USA.

The rather lovely couple.

I had the good fortune to spend a couple of happy hours hanging around with the charming Mandarin Duck at Keston Ponds, in greater London, near the town of Orpington, where they live alongside the native Tufted Duck and Mallard.  They would take bread thrown to them off the water’s surface but always remained warier than the Mallards or Geese, sticking a few metres from the nearest human, of which, on a sunny day, a green oasis in metropolitan Kent attracts many.  Here they find the small, wood-fringed pools they favour in their native range, and old trees in which to nest.  They suit the place well, it represents their habitat, a similar climate to their native range, and hardly seem out of place, especially as green parakeets from Himalayan India fly squawking overhead.  Mandarin Ducks seem to me a very welcome addition to our fauna, exotic, beautiful, and here to stay.

The Mandarin Duck's habitat at Keston Ponds.

Male Mandarin Duck.

 

Walthamstow Marshes, an Oasis in an Urban Desert.

I wrote this a good few days ago, about a trip I made last Saturday with my good freind Bexx, to a gem of a reserve in the heart of North East London.

Today was a gorgeously sunny day, and I spent at least part of it in the back garden watching the Holly Blue butterflies, which must have just appeared. As the air cools and darkens I’m going to take the opportunity to share a trip to Walthamstow Marshes, an Olympics survivor and nature reserve, which I visited with my friend Bexx  a couple of days ago.

Walthamstow Marshes sits beside the River Lee and opposite a pub, somewhere in Hackney, or possibly Haringey,  in urban North-East London. Two railway lines cross the nature reserve and the well made, gravel paths are well trodden, indeed, it is not the kind of place one can go to be alone. However it is a wildlife oasis, set in the middle of the gritty urban jungle, and as such, not a bad place at all to escape the to, and a valuable asset to the local area.

On a grey Sunday, my friend Bexx and I decided to give the place a visit.  We’d passed it on our last stroll along the Lee, and had a drink in the Anchor and Hope opposite, a pub popular with the Lee’s narrow boat community, as well as ageing indie kids like us. On route we saw a couple of Common Terns over the river, apparently fishing, and several of the usual mallards, mute swans and Canada geese, which seem to thrive here. Upon arriving at the reserve, having walked for some time beside the Lee, we crossed the bridge and were immediately greeted  by a building housing a new (and temporary) basketball court. Signs promised that the land it used would be restored as open access green land “by October 2012,” but it was an incongruous addition to the otherwise surprisingly lush landscape.Graffiti on the bridge itself also expressed local resentment to the coming Games, and the heavy price the host boroughs have paid for it. Perhaps we should wait for the Olympic Park before we write off the event in terms of the environment, David Lindo, famous for his "urban birder" columns, reckons the habitat creation there has been pretty good. I imagine I will find out in time.

As we walked alongside a ditch, which according to signage hosts a rare fern called Adder’s Tongue, we could hear a blackbird and a reed warbler singing, and there were several swifts wheeling about, giving their gleeful, excited whistling calls, one of the most joyful sounds of summer to my mind.  Yellow flag bloomed in the ditch, and a blue flower I later learned was an introduced species and speciality of the Lee Valley called Russian Comfrey, was everywhere, alongside several escaped specimens of Oilseed Rape, a common crop grown for oil and animal feed.  It is the same yellow stuff which covers whole swathes of the countryside from now until mid June. Some fresh phragmites was beginning to emerge from the water, and the grasses were mostly of the bright green, broad and lush variety. A few stinging nettles, characteristic of nutrient rich soils peered out from among the waterside vegetation, and cow parsley thrived too, suggesting perhaps some mild nutrient enrichment, but not atypical of these flat, low river floodplains.

A railway bridge crosses the site not far from the Anchor and Hope, and a blue plaque advertised that this was where Alliot Vernon Roe first flew his triplane in the 1900s, becoming the first British man to fly a British designed and built aircraft. He assembled it under the arches. Beyond the arches a Kestrel was hovering. I realised that I like this place a lot.

At the next bridge we walked away from the river and through some scrub into an avenue lined with magnificent Horse Chestnuts with towering pink and white blossoms. Swifts circled above our heads and somewhere a robin was singing its heart out. The wild flowers here were pretty, but included introduced cultivars like Russian Comfrey, which we were introduced to by a kindly, if slightly eccentric pair of Botanists who we found standing among it. According to them it was introduced 200 years ago and now flourishes through the Lee valley. It has blue flowers, and was brought home from St Petersburg by a local landowner and keen gardener. Also among the plants were oilseed rape,  the big yellow Brassica famous for its EU subsidies, and cow parsley, a common plant of these nutrient rich grasslands. A couple of Linnets flew past, which struck me as unusual, to see such a farmland bird in the city, but beyond the railway was a field of horses, and a small riding school, still so close to Hackney and the city.

We saw a song thrush, sitting on a bush, singing, and a couple of whitethroats flying about.  There were a few green and goldfinches overhead. For birds nothing here was unfamiliar, but in concrete London these are things which are seldom encountered, and their presence underlined the importance of these urban oases.  Chiffchaffs and Willow Warblers sang, too. We had to pass under a couple of railway lines, with accompanying graffiti and concrete on the way. People walking in the opposite direction were mostly Londoners, and generally differed from the usual nature reserve crowd in their studious avoidance of any verbal communication, although the botanists were very freindly, as were several of the dogs.

The botanising couple recommended a trip to the Waterworks, and we headed where another small nature reserve, with plenty of interpretive signage, had apparently been created in a disused water purification facility. The route took us along a stretch of road, which had on the opposite side of it, numerous business premises, some of them vacant. It was quite jarring to leave the tranquillity of the Marshes nature reserve and find ourselves back in Hackney. In acknowledgement of the danger of leaving interpretive signage unattended at night in North East London, by the time we arrived, the heavy gates of the Waterworks Nature Reserve were closing for the night. Perhaps it left us a little more to investigate in future. Cutting across the corner of Hackney Marshes, now used as a recreation and sports ground, we proceeded back to the Lee and its boats, and watched a little crowd of Long Tailed Tits fly over the water, and a cormorant drying itself on a pipe which crossed one of the canals. In the overcast the light was beginning to fade, and we made our way back through the local park, past a pair of Egyptian Geese, which were grazing on the short grass, and past the little crowds of young people who had begun to gather with their dogs in the park, back into the concrete jungle.