Greater Scaup

The virus I've been trying to shake off ever since receiving it as a Christmas present from the Boy Wonder hit a Victorian novel kind of crisis last night before apparently turning a corner, and this morning I got up feeling distinctly better.  Frankly I'm relieved about this: given that some of those fragile C19th heroines appear to have been able to enter a terminal decline just from getting damp feet, I don't like to think what standing around for hours in freezing weather up on the Cotswold scarp might have been able to do to me.

Anyway, after being up and about for a couple of hours without feeling the compulsion to cough up any more internal organs, I decided that I was probably safe going out, but with no Colonel Brandon around to rescue me if it all went bad I decided not to push my luck up on the scarp, and went to Farmoor instead. There I was able to do 13,000 steps on a decent paved surface, and dip into the café whenever I thought I might be starting to feel a tiny bit frail again. I was also lucky enough to bump into a couple of very experienced birders, who repaid me for pointing them in the direction of this Scaup by teaching me how to tell the difference between the Greater and Lesser species.

Paraphrasing my lesson briefly: the Greater Scaup is a robust duck with a neatly rounded head, and in the drake the the head iridescence is always green; whereas the Lesser Scaup is more finely built, has a slightly pointy head that looks almost as if it's trying to produce a Tuftie crest, and the drake's iridescence is purple. The Greater Scaup is a rare, and declining, winter visitor to the UK, where it's usually simply called the Scaup, but in this country the Lesser Scaup is a genuinely rare migrant. 

One of my two new acquaintances went on to teach me some useful things about gull identification as we strolled back along the causeway towards the car park, and also identified for me some overflying waterfowl that I'd have been unable to name without his help. In the course of our chat he mentioned having acted as relief wildlife warden at Farmoor for a few months last year, while the regular warden was away, and I asked if he knew whether the email I sent to the wardens' office back in October, asking for someone to go and help a Great Crested Grebe that was tangled in fishing line, had been received in time for the bird to be rescued. I was genuinely delighted when he told me that he'd received the message and had gone out straight away with the fishing warden (both wearing very large gloves), and that they'd found and caught the Grebe. He said that the fishing warden had been able to remove the line, and on release the bird had appeared to be fine, and had immediately started to dive for food.

13,000 steps, coffee and chocolate tiffin, some excellent learning, five new ticks on the 2025 bird list (taking the current total to 55 species), and a happy ending to a story that had caused me a lot of distress... today was a very good day.