With the recent run of very cold weather Eglwys Nunydd reservoir is now almost completely frozen over. There were 2 areas of unfrozen water which both held concentrations of waterfowl. The first video shows the frozen reservoir and location of the best unfrozen area.
The scene shown below is one you might expect to see at Slimbridge or another wildfowl sanctuary. 14 Species of bird are shown in the this next clip, including some nice records. An amazing sight I'm sure you'll agree, unfortunately the birds are clearly finding things difficult in this weather. Hopefully they will get a break before long.
Have a go at finding all 14 if you like. I'll sure a lot of you will find all 14 and who knows there may be one or two I've missed!!
10 comments:
The quality of the video isn't quite as I had hoped. I'm sure a few of you might enjoy this extra challenge! I'll post the answers in a couple of days for those interested. Feel free to beat me to it!
I could definitely make out 12 for starters - I'll have another look later to look for the others... a great record of conditions.
A great website even for amateur birders. Just a query: is there an easy way of encoding videos so that those of us with iPads or iPhones can watch them. (they are just blank spaces at the moment) How does YouTube do it? But great work!
Chris
Hi Chris, I've wondered how to view the video through youtube also. I've uploaded video direct into blogger and have then tried to find the video in youtube without success in the past, even when I search the exact video title. Maybe the way forward is to load into youtube and copy back to the blog. Worth a shot anyway. Thanks very much for the feedback because I wouldn't have looked at it further had you not mentioned it.
On the video; it does seem I have counted Coot twice as a species!! Generally I won't count Coot at all so to count them twice is very unusual for me ;o) There are 13 species and one of them is very tough to make out.
To narrow it down a little occurs for 10 seconds between 1:30 and 2:20
I can still only see 12 species, though I can hear 2 more: Blackbird and what sounds like Bullfinch - thought initially it might have been a Siberian CHiffchaff! Put me out of my misery then; the birds I can see are MA CO TU MS PO CG GN LG SP BH CM & GA.
WN comes into view in the top left corner swimming left, behind a pochard. Swims up to CG and thrashes about in the water, keeping to the back the whole time.
Ok the full list as promised.
Mute Swan (MS) - 6
Canada Goose (CG) - 6
Mallard (MA) - 145
Gadwall (GA) - 16
Wigeon (WN) - 1
Pochard (PO) - 31
Scaup (SP) - 2
Tufted Duck (TU) - 194
Goldeneye (GN) - 15
Little Grebe (LG) - 6
Coot (CO) - 35
Black-headed Gull (BH) - 34
Common Gull (CM) - 6
Wigeon not an easy one to spot - Looks like there's a female Lesser Scaup in there as well ;o)
I saw that too (not at the time though). I have a still shot of the Scaup and she is in the background. Enlarging the photo does seem to show a large black nail? I had a better look today but no sign. But the duck there are moving in and out a lot. Could be another case of post photo id? :o( Perhaps there were 14 species after all :o)
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