February wash out

The first half of this month was so horribly wet and windy that I only managed a few short outings to my Brussels patch as well as a brief twitch to the first-winter Iceland Gull along the canal.  I made the most of a rare, sunny day mid-month by treating myself to a day at the coast, seeing two Short-eared Owls hunting in broad daylight, a flock of around 500 Barnacle Geese, and even bigger numbers of Curlew and Lapwing.  Most interesting, however, was a small group of White-fronted Geese which contained two orange-beaked individuals.  They were not of the Greenlandic race but regular albifrons and both were juveniles, so it would seem beak colouration may be more variable than is generally thought, or at least developing with age.

The weather had improved by the third week so I had a day in the Ardennes where a heavy layer of snow had fallen, producing a magical winter wonderland.  Unfortunately, though, most of the birds seemed to have retreated to lower elevations as we saw very litttle all day long and, after an hour-long walk in the forest, had only managed to find two Coal Tits, two Crested Tits, plus a Goldcrest!

Seeing double

My regular patch along the edge of the forest in south-eastern Brussels is well known amongst Brussels birders but doesn't usually get much attention from further afield.  The only rare birds of note it usually gets are the small group of Red-crested Pochards and our female Ferruginous Duck, both of which come back each winter.  It is, however, the only place in Brussels with a nice mixture of habitats so that you can find a good range of species: I regularly see around 50 species if I spend a few hours there.  I'm also officially the observer who has the highest species count within the reserve - 95 at the moment.  In all the years I've been going there, however,  I've never seen anything quite like today.  The Bittern it took me several attemps to see has been showing a bit more regularly recently and has attracted a lot of admirers since my last post.  This morning, though, someone looking for it suddenly noticed there were actually two of them, standing within a few feet of each other!  By the time I got there, a huge (for Brussels at least) crowd of about 20 people had developed and I had to jostle myself into position to see the evidence for myself.
Both of them must have excelled in their Bittern code-of-conduct exams as they were doing a great job at blending into the reeds and making photographing them impossible, but this Grey Heron was so busy hunting it didn't see me coming and then seemed to decide it was better to freeze and try to look invisible rather than make itself even more conspicuous by flying away.  The Bitterns should definitely start giving lessons!

Master of disguise

Believe it or not, there is actually a Bittern hiding in the above picture!  Presumably the same bird, which took me several attempts to see last winter, turned up again during the cold spell we had a couple of weeks ago and has been teasing me ever since.  I had already made two unsuccessful attempts to see it but, determined not to be beaten by a Bittern, I gave it another try this morning.  The second time I walked past this patch of reeds, I finally spotted a dark line that didn't quite look like a reed.  Just above-left of centre, you can see a few dark, tiger stripes on the Bittern's back.  No wonder I didn't see it the first time round!  Two other birders hadn't managed to find it either, yet it took me a good five minutes or so to finally get one of them onto the bird as it stood motionless amongst the reeds.  It took a lot of repositioning to get different angles, but I eventually puzzled together a bit by bit Bittern, first the head, then the beak, then the throat, then the eyes, before it turned and walked away from us, melting back into the reeds.  Thankfully, though, about once in a blue moon, it is possible to find one that hasn't read the Bittern code of conduct and does something stupid like standing in the middle of a frozen lake!