Warneford Meadow, a warm, grey mid-November morning. One minute I’m wondering about the earliest singing Song Thrush I’ve heard by about four weeks. The next, I glance up, and there pure white against the evenly grey sky, is a flying swan:
Or as I put it at the time: “OMG, there’s a f******g swan!”
Mute Swan is a rare bird up here, where we have no open water. I’ve recorded more than twice as many Tree Pipits (5), as I have Mute Swans (2), in the last four years.
In these situations, I reach straight for my camera. The detail on flying birds it can pick up will be much greater than I will see, even with binoculars. I fired off a dozen or so pictures, then moved back to binoculars to watch the swan continue north-east, over the Churchill Hospital and away over Headington and out of sight. Was it the way the head and bill profile appeared long and smooth in the camera viewfinder that made a voice in my head say “that could be a Whooper?” Or maybe it was just the time of year? Either way, as I reached down to check the pictures on the back of my camera, I knew the identity of this bird was about to be resolved. I looked at my first picture of the bird and zoomed straight in on the head. It was a Whooper Swan!
It had the head profile of a ski-ramp, long and smooth, blending seamlessly into the forehead. Some yellow was just about visible on the bill. To me, the underside of the bill and the head appear pretty flat and in line with the underside of the neck in flying Mute Swans. Whereas in Whooper Swans the head bulges lower down, beneath the line of the neck in flight. This was very apparent in the field and in the pictures, above and below.
A Whooper Swan, over Headington – a record so unexpected, that it was not even on my fantasy list of potential new bird species! This is up there with the other great Lye Valley flyover records, Bar-tailed Godwit (April 2020) and Great White Egret (March 2022). These moments make local patch birding so rewarding. What next?!
The eBird list from today is here, a Woodcock flushed from Churchill Meadow was also notable.