The Wigeon
At Elmley Nature Reserve on the Isle of Sheppey, last March, numerous pre-migrating wigeon ( Anas penelope) were resting.
The peace they spread was in keeping with this private and exemplary reserve, run by Georgina Fulton, who inherited the former farm, and her husband, Gareth, once adjutant of the Yorkshire Regiment. They keep numbers civilised by not having a café or a shop, while predators are also controlled. One result is that Elmley’s 400 breeding lapwing pairs represent 80 per cent of the south of England’s total.
Two hundred wigeon breed in Britain, and 450,000 winter here. Among duck, only mallard outnumber them. It is the whistling call that gives it the name and voices the melancholy of its favourite habitat, the salt marshes bordering estuaries and bays. Isolated lochs and deserted reservoirs tempt them inland, but they are most abundant, sometimes in large flocks, by the sea.
This makes the wigeon the wildfowler’s duck par excellence. With few exceptions, our great hunter naturalists – J G Millais, Abel Chapman, Peter Scott and ‘BB’ – have been wildfowlers.
As Millais wrote ( The Wildfowler in Scotland, 1901), when the wind howls and the snow falls, the wildfowler must abandon the fireside and be ‘off at once to listen for the whistle of the duck overhead, or to peer through the gloom for the pack of wigeon’ and thus enjoy, ‘as few other men, the inexpressible beauty of the coming or the departing day’.
For the purist, wildfowling is estuarine punt gunning – the steering of a 1¾-bore gun mounted on a boat. That supreme conservationist Sir Peter Scott has been its most famous exponent. ‘The thrill of stalking a great pack of wigeon or geese, as one lies flat and hidden in a craft which only shows a few grey inches above water, and draws fewer below, cannot easily be described,’ he wrote ( Morning
Flight, 1933). ‘In this sophisticated land, it is one of the few remaining sports to offer adventure.’
In Norfolk, I saw a newly-built, two -man example – 24 feet long; 8½-foot gun; wood and steel that had been camouflaged grey. Its traditionalist makers, both irreproachable conservationists, hope to take it to the northern firths this winter. Punt gunners are a rarity, but since 1897 there has been a punt-gun salute every Coronation and Jubilee at Cowbit, Lincolnshire.
The wigeon is prized for its taste and size; it was formerly indicated as a ‘half duck’ or a ‘lady fowl’. Because it’s a ‘wild fowl’ by nature, its whereabouts are hard to predict. Personal memory encompasses a Perthshire lochan in August and a November evening in the Borders, when a succession of packs flighted into a ‘flash’ by Greenlaw Moor, where before only teal had come.
At Elmley, from autumn to spring, you are certain to see this beautiful duck; you can even rent one of several bell tents, huts or the cottage for an overnight stay.
The 2021 Bird of the Month calendar is now available: www.carryakroyd.co.uk