Wigeon are so much part of the winter fabric in the mid-Yare valley that one starts to become a little blase about their presence, though one should note that they’re not as numerous now as they were. Thirty years ago the area held a winter maximum of 10,000. Even two decades later the books said 8,000, but by 2016 the figure had fallen to 2,550.
Even so, a thousand on a lunchtime walk is both normal and enough for anyone to become a connoisseur of the wigeon’s finer points. One can so easily take for granted the precision-placed colours in their jeweller’s beauty. I’m thinking particularly of the drake’s polished cornelian head, his rose-quartz breast, his jet undertail coverts and that lovely lozenge of malachite laid into the wing’s trailing edge.
One can also get a little dismissive of the male’s wonderful whistling calls, which lie at the root of the word “wigeon”. It may sound perverse but, amid all the musical high chorus of the drakes, the note I now love just as dearly is the female’s strange, gruff, tobacco-edged, throat-clearing he-he-heeee, which has a hint of smutty humour about it.
Yet the detail I love most of all arises when a flock flies up off the marsh. The birds fling themselves wildly over the river, spooked perhaps by a low plane or hunting harrier. They come hard in one brewing mass, perhaps 200 strong – 120kg of driven fletch – out of the blue dazzle on a bright afternoon, straight at me.
Then they must bank, so that I can enjoy the hundreds of momentarily blinking white panels across the males’ wings. And finally comes the climax, as they settle back on to the river.
Wigeon taking off are frenetic. On landing, however, they make precision instruments of all their plumage: the tail feathers spread and depending like inverted willow leaves, the wingbeats cautious and so deep they seem almost circular and slow. And down the birds come, slate feet splayed, and the male, wrapped in the glazed spread of his grey wings, the malachite shining brightly, lands in its own momentary vessel of sunlit droplets.
