Things were looking up a bit in the days after my paltry Great British Bird Watch, as a volley of long-tailed tits started turning up on the garden feeders with some regularity for a few days afterwards and the odd red kite continued to sail by at low altitude.
Then yesterday I had a meeting with a few friends in Hexham. Having read on the @NTBirdClub twitter feed that a smew and a red-breasted merganzer had recently turned up on the river at Tyne Green, I chucked a pair of binoculars and a camera in the bag on the off-chance there would be time to take a look between trains.
Indeed there was, and when a couple of us got down to the river, who we should bump into but @birderlewis, a fifteen year old lad who had posted the info on twitter and told us that he'd seen both and the smew was still around close to the opposite bank.
I got a snap of a suspect that eventually turned out to be a female goldeneye. We foraged around a bit and saw a couple of treecreepers at work, before deciding to see if we could get a better shot of the "smew".
Moving back downriver in fading light, I caught sight of a couple of ducks playing around near the edge of the far bank under neath a falling tree. A quick check in the binoculars showed they had brown heads and so I took a shot and concluded "job done" we'd found a couple of smew - subject to photographic confirmation as the distance was too great and the light too poor to be certain.
Inspired by this success, I decided to cycle the 20 miles back to Hexham today (against considerable headwind I might add) to see if I could bag the merganzer. I thought I'd found them but in fact they turned out to be goosanders - as did the photos I took last night.
Still thinking that I was getting merganzers, I took another snap of these four today, only to find on returning to the computer that the one trailing behind is a smew!
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| Goosanders and Smew |
Still I'd never seen a smew before. As I said earlier - sometimes you just get lucky.
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