Whoop! Whoop!

"Unremarkable" was how I was preparing to describe this weekend by lunchtime on Sunday. Not a sniff of any migrants and frankly not alot else to write home about. And then BLAM, a very distant party of 15 Whooper Swan appeared heading north over Kelk village. I tracked them for a minute and to my surprise they lost height and were gliding. Were they going to land in the pastures? That would be unheard of!

This was the view from a kilometre away...


I decided to calmly plough on with my walk rather than divert on the off chance. An hour or so later I find myself face-to-face with the flock on the pasture in Little Kelk. Superb!


Several hours later after returning from my afternoon trip the same flock had relocated two fields north, next to Little Kelk Farm. All my previous records of Whooper are either flyovers or at Kelk Lake when it was still attractive to wildfowl. Not once have I seen any in a field.

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This final shot gives some idea of how ridiculous this sighting was. A herd of swans having a bit of a rest. In a corn field. Note the absence of evocative winter wetlands. I guess they'll be headed for Scotland to fuel up for the trip to the tundra in Iceland (or arctic Europe) some time in April.

More write up later in the week :)