25th April - Ring-necked Duck

I was busy working away at home when I got word that Darren had found a female Ring-necked Duck at the North plains bit of Campfield Marsh RSPB reserve. I had a very busy day with work, so could not get away until early evening. Craig was very excited about this small twitch, infact he ran all the way down the hill he was working on, jumped into his car and drove all the way to my house in reverse. Sounds a strange thing to do I know, but if you met him in person you would realise that this is quite normal behaviour. Anyway he arrived at my house several hours before he left and subsequently had to wait until I had finished work, Kath had returned home and the spider in the corner of the room had evolved into a jet propelled personnel carrier. We were going to head off to Campfield Marsh in this jet propelled personnel carry until we realised that it had to stop to feed on flies every two hundred yards. As this was clearly not an efficient method of travel we went in Craig's car instead.

We arrived at North Plains and after the treacherous hike to the second pool (many have attempted this and very few have returned) we were rewarded with nice views of the female Ring-necked Duck. I have managed to see many individuals of this species over my 192 years of birding and Craig has also seen several during the 2389902.5768 years that he has been birding, however this was the first female of this species that either of us have observed. The views were very good and we managed to get some reasonable pictures even though the light was terrible.

There was very little of note on the reserve, so we decided to have a quick look to see if anything was passing on the solway, it was fairly quiet.

We had to head back home as Craig had to go to his wool spinning and yoga class, whilst I had a another rapidly evolving spider to remove from my left nostril.