British birds: goose, swan and duck

Cheshire is one of the most water-filled English counties so it’s no surprise I’ve encountered a lot of water birds during my walks in the local countryside. These geese, swan and ducks are among the more common species.

Rather than populate this post with a lot of facts and figures that can easily be obtained elsewhere, I’ve just added a few interesting snippets of information I’ve discovered about each species.

Canada Goose (Branta canadensis)

Let’s start with an immigrant, originally introduced to English parkland around 1665, specifically for King Charles II to add to his wildfowl collection in St James’s Park in London. They have since gone forth and multiplied to the extent that they are frequently considered a nuisance. As well as being aggressive pursuers of the bread so many people dispense freely in parks (watch out for nips!), they also have the digestive capacity to process three times as much grass as the average sheep and the more alarming ability to poo every four minutes!

That's a Greylag mixing with his Canada Geese friends above right

Greylag Goose (Anser anser)

According to the British Trust for Ornitholgy (BTO) website, the Greylag Goose is ‘traditionally eaten at Michaelmas’ and ‘Mrs Beeton recommends cooking with a glass of port or wine to which has been added a teaspoon of mustard, some salt and a few grains of cayenne pepper’. If, like me, you’d prefer not to eat these beautifully patterned creatures, you might want to worship them instead. More than 5000 years ago, the goose was associated with Gula, the fertility deity of the citizens of the Tigris-Euphrates city-states. In ancient Egypt, geese were a symbol of the sun god Ra, and in ancient Greece and Rome geese were sacred to Aphrodite.

Egyptian Goose (Alopochen aegypticus)

It might look like a goose and be called a goose but the Egyptian Goose is not really a goose at all. It’s more closely related to the Shelduck and occasionally shares that duck’s habit of nesting in a burrow or hole in the ground, though it has also been known to build a nest as high as 80 feet above the ground in a tree. The bird was introduced to Britain in 1678 as an ornamental wildfowl species, another for the king’s collection of birds in St James’s Park in London, but has since established itself in the wild, though it does still have a penchant for the grounds of large halls and estates, with their perfect habitat combination of old woodland and extensive areas of water. My photo was taken at Tatton Park Estate near Knutsford.

Mute Swan (Cygnus olor)

In England, the ancient practice of swan-upping still takes place each July on the river Thames. Swan used to be owned exclusively by the Crown (and a few select favourites of the King or Queen) so swan were caught every year and marked, on the upper bill, with a system of nicks and cuts to indicate ownership. Fortunately, these days, the birds are rather more humanely banded instead by the Queen’s Swan Marker and the swan uppers of the descendants of two centuries-old medieval guilds, the Worshipful Company of Dyers and the Worshipful Company of Vintners.  

Cygnets and juvenile Mute Swan

Female Tufted Duck at left and male at right

Tufted duck (Aythya fuligula)

The BTO website reports that the population of the cute little Tufted Duck expanded rapidly during the late 19th and early 20th centuries due to the colonisation of British waterways by the small freshwater bivalve, the Zebra Mussel, the perfect food for a duck that loves to dive. They are fascinating to watch when hunting for food and I particularly love their floppy little top-kot.

Female Mallard

Mallard (Anas platyrhynchos)

Though male and female Mallard are so different they were originally thought to be two different species, today they are what almost everyone imagines when they hear or read the word ‘duck’, and they are the bird people most loved to feed with old scraps of bread. Please don’t! As Britain’s Canal and River Trust has recently been warning, with an estimated 6 million loaves of bread being thrown into canals and waterways every year, bread is a serious problem for the ducks’ environment, and it’s not very healthy for the ducks either. Click on this link to read about the more natural alternatives. 

Wild mallards are thought to be the original source for at least 20 officially recognised breeds of domestic ducks, like the Aylesbury and the Chocolate Magpie, and countless other ‘Manky Mallards’, a colourful expression commonly used by to describe the motley menagerie of wild and domestic mallards.

Aylesbury Ducks, living the wild life at Pickmere Lake

Chocolate Magpie Ducks, also reverted to the wild side

Manky Mallards

Many of the fact-lets for this blog post came from that most excellent publication, Birds Britannica, Mark Cocker and Richard Mabey, Chatto & Windus, London, 2005, as well as from the website of the British Trust for Ornithology.   

Cheshire walks: Shakerley Mere

Last Sunday I went for a stroll around Shakerley Mere, a man-made lake that was originally a quarry for the sand used to make coloured glass. Between 45 and 50 metres underground in this area lie glacio-fluvial deposits of sand and gravel deposited during the last glaciation. At Shakerley, when the sand extraction dried up in the early 1960s, those fine chaps at British Industrial gifted the mere to Cheshire County Council as a recreational park. The quarry site gradually filled with water and created the mere we see today.

The reserve is roughly triangular in shape and the land flat so the 1.4 kilometre walk around is a breeze for all ages and takes no more than half an hour at a leisurely pace – though it will take a lot longer if you search almost every inch of the trees and scrub for fungi, as Sarah and I did. The main path is suitable for wheelchairs and baby buggies and, with tables and seats scattered around the lakeside, this is also a lovely place to picnic beneath the birch and oak.

The pretty woodland around the lake’s edge provides a welcome home to a variety of birds and plants, dragonflies, damselflies and butterflies (though we didn’t spot flutterbies of any kind on this rather windy, autumnal day). Our waterbird sightings included gaggles of Canada Geese, flocks of black-headed gulls, many Mallards, a Muscovy duck and an Aylesbury duck, a mute swan, one black cormorant, a couple of moorhens and coots.

Mute swan, left, and Aylesbury duck, right

Canada geese galore!

Apparently, lots of cormorants join the flocks of black-headed gulls that enjoy Shakerley for a spot of winter roosting, and the great crested grebe is resident in all but the most severe weather. Unfortunately, we missed seeing the grebes and the occasional herons that feed on fish fry and amphibians along the mere edge. We also missed the kingfishers that are year-round residents and we’ll need to go back for sightings of the oystercatchers that visit during the summer months.

For the fisherman, the Mere is stocked with carp, bream, roach and perch. The water is leased by Lymm Angling Club and, for the keen visiting angler, day permits are available.

As well as the woodland, there is also a small area of heathland in the south east corner of the reserve and it is a Site of Biological Importance (note the capital letters!). Invasive trees and shrubs have to be kept from invading this area so I imagine there’s a bit of scrub-bashing goes on here from time to time. Heathland is a habitat created by man – early man cleared the trees and shrubs, rain washed most of the minerals out of the dry, sandy soil so only plants like heather will grow in the altered habitat.

Some of the fungi we found

The heathland at Shakerley is made up of heather and cross-leafed heath, with cotton grass and rush growing in the damp hollows, and coarse purple moor grass growing between the heather plants. Also, Shakerley Mere is the only place in Cheshire where Marsh St John’s Wort can be found – just thought you’d like to know that!

Perhaps you’re also curious, as I was, about the name Shakerley. Well, the mere sits near the tiny settlement of Allostock, which dates back to at least the 13th century and has strong connections to two old families, the Grosvenors and the Shakerleys. According to Wiki,

‘In 1453 the Shakerleys inherited Hulme Hall and about 1000 acres of Allostock’s 3000 acres, through the female line. Several of the Shakerleys are buried in the Shakerley Chapel in the south aisle of Lower Peover Church where memorials may be seen including one to Sir Geoffrey Shakerley who fought for the King in the Civil War. At the Battle of Rowton Moor near Chester [in 1645], Sir Geoffrey rowed across the Dee in an old tub with his horse swimming beside him. Roundheads were blocking the roads and he needed to warn the King. The King hesitated with his orders. Sir Geoffrey rowed back but arrived too late and the battle was lost. In Lower Peover Church the Shakerley crest (a hare and a wheat sheaf) can still be seen on several of the box pew ends. The pews were reserved for the Shakerley tenants. In 1720 the Shakerleys built Somerford Hall (now demolished) as their main residence and Hulme Hall became a farm house.’

The very grand Somerford Hall before it was demolished. Photo courtesy of Matthew Beckett www.lostheritage.org.uk

Pretty autumn colours and even more Canada geese

The only down side about this lovely place is its proximity to the M6 motorway. The constant whizz of cars zooming by on the side of the trees rather spoils the calm of an otherwise tranquil setting. But let’s not end on a negative note … the trees were wonderful, dressed in their autumn colours, the fungi were prolific and fascinating, the birdlife was plentiful and keen to interact (read: feed me bread please!), and the place wasn’t too crowded. In my book, those are all the ingredients for a perfect walk!