Feast

I wanted to photograph some birds today, but the both my weather apps predicted changeable conditions up on the Cotswold scarp, and I know just how much fun that can be, so I decided to try Farmoor instead. En route to Oxfordshire I kept glancing over towards the owl field and wondering if I'd made the right choice, but I think on balance that I probably did. It was sunny when I parked the car, and the light on the reservoir was so dazzling that I could hardly make out any birds through the glare, but literally within five minutes a rain front blew in, and as I scuttled into the café I was glad to know I'd be waiting it out in a warm dry place, with a coffee and a chocolate cookie to keep me company.

The Great Northern Diver I photographed a couple of weeks ago is still at Farmoor, but though I tracked it back and forth along the causeway for a while it was hunting out towards the middle of F2, and never came close enough for good photos. Luckily though there were a few other interesting birds about, and I've chosen a couple of them for this post.

The main image is a Coot feeding on freshwater mussels, which is something I'd never seen before. Coots spend a lot of time gathering and eating vegetable matter such as water weeds and grasses, but when they can find them they also eat aquatic insects and their larvae, water snails, and mussels. There's a large winter population of coots at Farmoor, so competition for these clumps of mussels is pretty fierce, and whenever I saw a bird bring some to the surface it would take them off to a quiet spot in the hope of not being robbed of its feast.

Tonight's second bird is a Redshank - the first I've ever seen at Farmoor. This reservoir isn't a good site for waders because it shelves quite steeply and the edges are all man-made, with no natural substrates or plant life, so I was surprised to encounter this bird. It seemed quite unsettled, and although I saw it fly past and heard it calling several times during the afternoon, I didn't manage to get a lens on it until my final circuit of F2, when I spotted it on the western bank in some rather extreme sunset light. I can't decide whether I like this photo or not, but as R commented when he saw it, it is at least different.