Tuesday, July 8, 2008 - A Shardeloe mandarin
No major birding trips to report on but I did manage one brief outing earlier on this week when my VLW (very lovely wife) went up to London leaving me to look after our two year old son L and naturally I felt that he was best occupied by being taken out on a birding trip for a few hours. I had been intending to explore more of the Blenheim Palace grounds to look for a mandarin duck which was one of the birds still remaining on my summer hit list. However, the day before someone on the Bucks Birders Yahoo group had reported their sightings on a trip to Shardeloes Lake including a female mandarin so I thought that I would head out there instead - if nothing else it would be a nice opportunity to visit somewhere new.
I packed a picnic lunch and we set off in the car, with L choosing to have a little nap on the 45 minute journey. Shardeloes Lake is near Amersham on the South Bucks way and is very pleasantly situated by a lovely meadow that was full of butterflies. I know that many birders turn to these insects in the summer months when the birding is quiet but I've yet to succumb to this. Nevertheless I was interested to see several which I am pretty sure were "marbled whites".
The lake itself is not particularly large nor very wide but it has several small islands in it and one end is rather marshy and full of reeds. Pushing L in his all-terrain buggy I walked from one end to the other checking out all the birds, looking for my mandarin. There were plenty of coots, moorhens, tufted ducks, little and great crested grebes and mallards. There were also loads of swifts hunting low over the water. Despite checking all the likely ducks carefully and scouring the edges of the lake and around the islands there was no sign of my mandarin and I was starting to feel rather disappointed. Whilst a mandarin duck is not a particular rarity I hadn't actually seen one since I'd taken up birding again and as well as needing it for my year list, I was keen to re-acquaint myself with such a pretty water fowl.
By this time I'd reached the marshy end of the lake where reed warblers could be heard singing amongst the dense vegetation. I also spotted a young goldcrest foraging amongst the trees. I peered about the myriad of small islands at this end, thinking that if the mandarin was hidden down here I'd never find it. I got L out of his buggy and decided that we should walk back slowly and find a nice picnic spot where we could eat our lunch. I'd just chosen a likely looking spot and had a quick scan round to see if I'd missed anything when suddenly there was the mandarin duck with her two ducklings in tow. She was rather shy and hugged the far shoreline before slipping back out of sight after a few minutes but it was long enough for me to get a digiscoped record shot of her.
 The female Mandarin Duck and one of her ducklings.
At this point for some reason L decided that he didn't like picnics and started to kick up a fuss. I don't know what the problem was but he got quite upset so I put him back in his buggy and started to head back to the car, stopping periodically to scan the water. I did manage to find a couple of ruddy duck, looking rather like female tufted ducks at this time of year but giving themselves away by their enormously wide bills and the fact that they didn't have golden eyes like the tufties. The only other sighting of interest was a brief glimpse of shimmering blue as a kingfisher darted across the water.
Another hit list target achieved so now there's just redstart, nightingale and firecrest left to get. The year list moves on, albeit at a slow pace.
185: mandarin duck
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About Me
I used to be a birder in my youth but rather lost interest in my teens as other things became more interesting. However recently I've rediscovered this interest and would like to share my sightings and thoughts in this blog.
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