Wildlife lovers upset by bird ensnared in discarded twine at Walthamstow Wetlands

19th January

By Kaisha Langton  @KaishaLangton Reporter

Wildlife lovers are calling for monitoring of animals after a bird was ensnared at the Wetlands.

A tweet from @Green_Balcony reported a visitor to Walthamstow Wetlands had seen a bird ensnared in discarded twine "left to suffer in the water".

The tufted duck caught in fishing wire on Thursday was rescued by rangers and returned to the Wetlands.

The ten reservoirs at the site offer a haven for overwintering wildfowl, such as pochard and gadwell, and breeding birds such as grey heron, tufted duck and little egret.

Additionally, swifts visit during the spring and kingfisher and peregrine falcon can be seen all year round.

A Walthamstow Wetlands spokeswoman said: "We had a report that there was a tufted duck caught in fishing wire today.

"The bird was rescued promptly by the rangers onsite and released in good health.

"This is an unfortunate, but rare, occurrence, and our onsite team monitor the wildlife onsite daily."

The Wetlands is a Site of Special Scientific Interest, part of the Lee Valley Special Protection Area and is on the Ramsar List of Wetlands of International Importance.

Read on

Australia's first tufted duck sighting creates a 'mega-twitch' at sewage pond

Bird-watchers flock to Werribee treatment plant, near Melbourne, to see Eurasia native

Calla Wahlquist

Tue 15 Jan 2019 06.46 GMTLast modified on Tue 15 Jan 2019 06.48 GMT

The Werribee sewage ponds are one of the most popular bird-watching locations in Australia. On a good day, says Birdlife Australia’s Sean Dooley, you may see as many as five or six other cars there.

That was before the tufted duck arrived.

 “I counted when I left, there were 35 cars of birders,” Dooley said, adding: “It was a mega-twitch.”

“It’s the biggest twitching event I have witnessed first-hand in Australia — it felt like I was in England,” he said.

The cause of all this fuss is a rather unassuming-looking black duck with white flanks and bright yellow eyes. It was spotted and identified by some visiting American twichers on 2 January as a male tufted duck, Aythya fuligula, a species of diving duck native to northern Eurasia but not uncommonly found in coastal areas in North America.

It is the first time the species has been sighted in Australia.

The visiting twitchers alerted the locals, who shared the find on social media.

Continued  

Gulls follow ducks to find dinner

Date: November 5, 2015

Source: Central Ornithology Publication Office

Gulls have learned to follow diving ducks and take the bottom-dwelling mussels that the ducks bring to the surface, a food source that would otherwise be inaccessible to them. Gulls are one of the most adaptable groups of birds, able to exploit a wide variety of food resources and respond to new opportunities, and a study forthcoming in The Auk: Ornithological Advances documents this previously unrecognized behavior in Herring Gulls (Larus argentatus) and Mew Gulls (Larus canus) on a brackish lagoon on the Germany-Poland border.

Ducks wintering on Szczecin Lagoon dive to the bottom to forage on zebra mussels, bringing clumps of mussels to the surface and regularly losing fragments in the process. To determine whether the gulls on the lagoon take advantage of this or if their presence while the ducks are foraging is only a coincidence, Dominik Marchowski of Szczecin University and his colleagues observed the behavior of the birds between October 2013 and November 2014, watching three species of duck--the Common Pochard (Aythya ferina), Tufted Duck (A. fuligula), and Greater Scaup (A. marila)--through spotting scopes. They recorded how intensely the ducks were foraging and whether any gulls were present, and they also collected gull pellets to confirm what they were eating.

Continued ...