Flat

Day Two of my extended birthday saw R and me heading for Farmoor Reservoir in search of a Great Northern Diver. "I can go on my own," I said, "and meet up with you for lunch afterwards." "But it's your birthday," said R. "So I'd like to come with you." It wasn't actually my birthday, of course, and he's neither a birder, a photographer, nor partial to being kept hanging around. But I'm starting to think that he might just possibly be a keeper.

As soon as we arrived at Farmoor we went to the sailing club café for a small refresher, then set off in search of the Diver, which we were lucky to spot quite quickly, a little way off the central causeway. It moved away from us pretty fast, but we tracked it back to the eastern edge of the reservoir, and then walked up and down the car park wall for quite a while, following it as it hunted back and forth. R became quite interested in, and good at, predicting where it would come up after a dive, and we both started to be able to predict those dives from the fact that the bird would allow itself to sink well down in the water as though heavily laden, before neatly tucking in its head and disappearing. Great Northern Divers can dive to a depth of sixty metres and stay down for up to a minute, though their average dive time is just over forty seconds. R timed one of this one's dives at forty six seconds, and used this to predict its subsequent dives. We never saw it with any prey, but Divers swallow small food items underwater, and only bring large victims to the surface. They're very partial to crayfish, and I'd been hoping to see it catch one of the pestilent American Signal Crayfish that have infested Oxfordshire's waterways, but on this occasion that didn't happen.

My main image shows the bird in a defensive posture, laying nearly flat along the water, because it was concerned about... a small group of Little Grebes. Given their relative sizes this was quite amusing, but to be fair Little Grebes can be quite aggressive, and possibly the Diver had fallen foul of some on a previous occasion. My second photo shows it swimming in a normal upright posture; and over on my Facebook page you can see its low-in-the-water pre-dive posture. I'd been expecting to photograph this bird in bright sunshine, but as it turns out I'm happy that today's Met Office forecast for Farmoor was wrong: I think the combination of cool, flat light and calm water sets off the Diver especially well.