A case for shelduck homes

When it loses its flight feathers in the summer moult, the shelduck cannot fly so congregates in large numbers to feed on mudflats

One of my favourite recent memories is of watching a newly fledged brood of shelducks crossing Lady Anne’s Drive on the Holkham estate in Norfolk. You’ll know the feeling; one of those moments when your knowledge of how a species behaves enables you to see something that most people are going to miss.

I spotted an adult shelduck about 400m away, lurking in the long grass and looking about anxiously. No bird would put itself in such a vulnerable position without good cause. It was soon on the move and another adult came into view. Between the two adults there was space for a line of puff-ball chicks but that was just an assumption, for the moment.

Lady Anne’s Drive is the main road down to the beach at Holkham. Scores of cars carrying families, birdwatchers and dog walkers pass back and forth each day, on the way to and from the car park. I was guessing that the shelducks needed to find a safe, watery refuge for their ducklings, so they would need to cross the road and to do so about 100m from where my wife and

I had parked the car.

We waited as the two shelducks moved towards the road and came to a halt in tall vegetation right next to it. A car passed by, then another and another — but eventually there was a big enough gap in the traffic and the head of an adult appeared above the grass. After a couple of false starts, one adult then a stream of chicks and the other parent, tightly packed in a line, dashed across. Nobody else saw them and they were soon travelling through the long grass again, on their way towards the pool and safety.

One of the fascinating facts about shelducks is that the adults gather

“More than 200,000 shelducks from north-west Europe and Scandinavia

congregate in the Wadden Sea”

together in very large numbers when moulting their flight feathers, with by far the biggest flocks occurring in the Wadden Sea, the coastal mud and sandflats of the eastern North Sea. More than 200,000 birds from all over the north-west European

GRAHAM APPLETON IS THE FORMER DIRECTOR OF COMMUNICATIONS OF THE BTO AND A FREELANCE WRITER AND BLOGGER