A South American Duck in the UK?

 *this is part two of two posts - go check out my last post at Sandbach Flashes SSI.

Hi everyone, we will continue from where we left off in the last post.

After recording the song birds we went over the road to another lake. The first bird to stand out was a beatiful curlew.

Not a great video but here is a shoveler from very far away:

A long-tailed tit:

We also got some cracking teal footage:

If you read the last post you would know that there was one species of duck that I was looking for. On their website the site had reported two ringed teals, a bird which definitely did not belong here seeing as they are usually found in South America. That means that there is one unhappy duck owner out there whose ringed teals have escaped. Two birders came over to the lake I was watching and said they were looking for the ringed teal. Almost instantly one of them found it through their scope (much better than anything I had). He let me have a look but I knew that my camera wouldn't be able to record it. They were also very hard to pick out in a big flock of wigeons. However, further down the road it turned out you got a much better view of them. And it turned out that there wasn't just two, there was actually three; one male and two females. 

Here is some of the footage I got - the male is the grey one in the middle with a brown back and on one of the videos you can see the two females to the side of him which are darker and have a pale patch on their faces.

Sorry, the videos are a little shaky; it was quite far away. This is the one with just the male.

Here is the one with the females as well.

Just as I was about to head back someone called me over as they had seen a pintail (another species of duck). This was the first time I had ever seen one before. A small flock of them were very far away so the the quality isn't great.

That's all for today's post. I wonder if ringed teal will ever become established in the UK just like mandarin ducks have? It would involve a few escapes but it could happen. I will try and get the camera trap out for Christmas and of course New Year. I can't promise Christmas but I am sure I will be able to get it out before the new year. Thank you for reading all my posts over 2024, and have a nice Christmas. Stay tuned for the post where we look back at my top ten favourite bits of footage from 2024 which should release on new year's day. Remember to leave a comment and thanks for reading!