Birthday trip to Welney

As a special treat for my 50th birthday, we went off to the Wildfowl and Wetland Trust's Welney Reserve. Many years ago I produced a Management Strategy for the Ouse Washes, and I still have a deep affection for it. The Welney Reserve has the advantage of a cafe and heated hide, which helped tempt my youngest offspring along too. Unfortunately the weather was pretty awful, with a deep grey sky and intermittent drizzle, which made photography challenging.

As usual there were heaps of mallard, pochard, mute and whooper swans near the main hide. Much of the area is still frozen which restricted the other birds a bit, but we saw some wigeon and pintail. There were five geese hanging around the main hide, four of which appeared to be greylags, with a single pink-footed goose accompanying them.

The highlight of the trip was seeing so many whooper swans, many of which had young. Whooper swans have a deep honking call and, despite their size, are powerful fliers. Whooper swans can migrate many hundreds of miles to their wintering sites in northern Europe and eastern Asia. They breed in subarctic Eurasia, further south than Bewicks in the taiga zone. They are rare breeders in northern Scotland, particularly in Orkney, and no more than five pairs have bred there in recent years. This bird is an occasional vagrant to western North America. Icelandic breeders overwinter in the United Kingdom and Ireland, especially in the wildfowl nature reserves of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and of the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust.

Whooper swans pair for life, and their cygnets stay with them all winter; they are sometimes joined by offspring from previous years. Their preferred breeding habitat is wetland. Both the male and female help build the nest, and the male will stand guard over the nest while the female incubates. The female will usually lay 4-7 eggs (exceptionally 12). The cygnets hatch after about 36 days and have a grey or brown plumage. The cygnets can fly at an age of 120 to 150 days.

I took many photographs today, some of which can be seen
here. But I felt I had to blip this brave family, with seven cygnets in tow. After such a mammoth journey, I think they deserve some recognition!

(Information on Whooper swans from Wikipedia)

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