Over the past week or so, from just before Christmas, there has been talk of another rare bird at Siddick Pond. This time it is a Smew. With its reported red head it must be either a female or a first-winter juvenile. Whilst I don’t normally go chasing after the unusual, Siddick Pond is on my local patch so I spent some time looking for it.
I could find several other brown and red-headed birds, Wigeon, female Pochards and Goldeneyes, but nothing that matched the idea of a female Smew that I’d picked up from guidebooks. Interestingly there were no Goosanders to be confused by, which is quite unusual here. There is, according to my books, some similarity between female Goosander and Smew until you look carefully.
I walked all the way up to the northern end of the pond, stopping from time to time to take photos of robins, tits and sparrows in the trees, It was on the way back that I came across a group of men with telescopes on tripods, all pointing in the same direction. They said they were watching the Smew. Pointing my camera (with 600mm lens) in the same direction I eventually found it as a pinprick in the far distance. This image above, one of three that caught the Smew, is the best. If only it had not been on the far side of the pond, but a bit nearer. This image is, by the way, shrunk down massively in size to fit the screen.
The bird near the centre of the image turned out to be a female Goldeneye, but to the right was another that looked promising. By cropping out that area immediately around the bird and doing quite a bit of processing to clarify and sharpen the image I ended up with the following (at its full size, without enlarging). It’s not sharp, but it’s recognisable.
Even without the detail that I’d have liked, the red head, yellowish bill and white lower face and neck are typical of a female Smew, so I can now claim to have seen one of only twenty-two spotted and reported in the UK so far this winter; that’s how rare it is.
A I repeatedly say, I’m not a twitcher but just a learning bird photographer. I don’t want to travel miles in the often vain hope of seeing something rare, but it is nice to catch sight of a rarity from time to time on my local beat. Other recent unusual birds on the Siddick Pond have been a Whooper Swan which stayed around for a few weeks, and a Black Swan. Both now seem to have moved on.
Over the next few days I’ll probably go back to Siddick. Who knows? I may get a better shot at the Smew.
