As much as I enjoy searching for, and finding, wildlife with our clients I have to admit to a fascination what wildlife does and how it behaves…
I collected Stephen and Kate from The Swan for their second day out with NEWT, this time exploring NEWT’s local patch of Druridge Bay and southeast Northumberland.
Druridge Bay is a great place throughout the year, there’s always plenty to see, and Thursday was no exception. Great Crested Grebes, haughtily elegant, Mallard, Wigeon, Teal, Tufted Duck, Gadwall, Shoveler, Shelduck, all so different from the duller plumage they’ll be wearing shortly, dainty Little Gulls flycatching amnogst flocks of Black-headed Gull and even a couple of rarities, Great White Egret, hunched in the rushes near a Grey Heron, and Bonaparte’s Gull, roosting with Black-headed Gulls, for good measure.
At this time of year one of the highlights is often wading birds on passage. These birds, so cryptically patterned during the winter months, often appear in rather stunning breeding finery at the end of spring passage, and the start of autumn passage. There’s little quite as remarkable as a male Ruff dressed in his best dancing clothes. This blog post from 2010 has an example of one 🙂 Passage birds in the spring have a raging passion burning in their blood, and as Curlew displayed overhead and Common Snipe dropped into the rushes we came across one male Ruff who was giving it his all. Jumping, prancing, strutting, spreading his ruff like an Elizabethan dandy and bowing handsomely and exaggeratedly at the feet of his intended. There was only one flaw in this impressive dance of desire…the subject of his attention was a Redshank! It would appear that in the absence of any Reeves our Ruff wasn’t going to hide his light under a bushel. Settling for second best, or blinded by desire, his ardour wasn’t dimmed by the persistent rejection from the obviously agitated Redshank 🙂
Wildlife does the funniest things…