Winter sun enhances the colours of wigeons' beautiful plumage

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jan/05/beautiful-plumage-wigeon-buckenham-norfolk

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I was fascinated to observe the wigeon flock at this wetland site follow a distinct behavioural pattern as each day progressed. Mornings would find the ducks slewed along the course of the Yare and initially there were about 2,000. The low-angled sunlight reduced them to mere black blobs spread across the curl and slap of the sparkling river. Periodically a passing raptor – marsh harrier or peregrine – would convulse them skywards, and with each panic the total would decline a fraction. Birds peeled away in sun-dazzled mobs to settle on the various dykes that divided the marsh.

The subgroups would initially mill on the water and preen. With such vast unblemished skies and the light now perfectly angled, the dykes were converted to intense lines of Greek blue. The ducks too were saturated in winter sun, and it inflamed the horse-chestnut red of the drake's head. It flared in the softer lion-beige of his crown. Then there were the glorious red-deer browns of the duck's breast and face. In truth the pleasure of wigeon – perhaps of all duck plumage – is that their feathers never create simple planes of colour. Her face and chest are freckled in cream or black; what seems pale grey on a male's back and flanks is in reality a thousand sinuous charcoal lines over white.

As the afternoon wore through, the clean wild piping that gives wigeon their name – and always surrounds them in an aura of innocence and comedy – had dwindled to the odd throaty grumble. And these were just the complaints of singletons, birds in brief dispute with neighbours. By mid-afternoon all were asleep and, but for my increasingly cold nose and the steam intensifying with each exhalation, there was an air of summer contentment to this beautiful scene. I suspect all this sunlit peacefulness was a product of wider astronomical conditions. Such was the cloudlessness of our nights that the wigeon could feed in the cold safekeeping of the moonlight.

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