Iffley to Farmoor is not too distant so with indecent haste I gulped down my breakfast and exited the cafe.
Twenty minutes later I was at Farmoor Reservoir and five minutes after that setting off up the causeway to the distant western end.The birding gods of Farmoor, as is customary with rare birds here had deemed the grebes should be as far from the car park as possible. As I walked I could see two fishing dinghys sailing directly into the northwest corner.Not a good sign. They would surely flush the birds
Although sunny there was a strong and cold north west wind blowing and the northwest corner was the only sheltered part of the basin, hence it having proved attractive to the grebes. Sadly so it now also was to the fishermen
I cursed but there was nothing I could do about it. I could see one birder looking through a telescope and after what seemed an age arrived alongside him
Are you looking at the grebes?
No, they flew off into the middle of the reservoir
He waved an arm in the general direction they had gone but seemed disinclined to venture any further information.
Inevitably the fishing dinghys had flushed them but at least they had remained on the reservoir.
Resigned to an even longer walk around the two mile circumference of the larger basin searching for them I set off at speed catching up with Tricia and Dan in the process and then, making my apologies left them in my wake as I sped along. Badger had just messaged that the grebes were now in the southeast corner so, making my way there I arrived to find a small gathering of Oxonbirds finest watching two very distant grebes, right out in the middle of the reservoir's choppy waters
They were micro dots in my bins and only slightly larger in a scope. Rising and falling in the wave troughs and regularly lost to view. The hope was that they would come closer but it soon became apparent that was highly unlikely as the two grebes swam around aimlessly, picking flies off the water and showing no signs of doing anything else.
Peter joined us and after a while our group slowly split up and everyone made their way towards the car park accepting that there was to be no close encounter with these two star birds.
Resigned to this fact Peter and I gravitated towards the cafe to indulge ourselves with a coffee each. In the cafe we decided to walk back around the larger basin in the forlorn hope the grebes might have come closer.
The first birder we met dashed our hopes when he told us they were, as before far out in the middle of the basin.
Let's carry on Peter
Why not, he replied
They could come closer, you never know
Further around we met David who told us they were still a long way out on the water but moving towards the north western end once more.
We carried on and once at the western side of the basin saw that the grebes seemed to still be moving towards the northwestern corner.They were certainly closer and just about in range of my camera and lens.
I commenced taking speculative shots as they swam in tandem across the smoother more sheltered waters.
For the next two hours they remained offshore but just about photographable, sometimes suggesting they might come closer but always stopping at some distance offshore, presumably wary of the constant flow of walkers, runners, fishermen and birders on the perimeter track
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We regularly lost sight of them as they showed a remarkable capacity to move considerable distances without being noticed, sometimes underwater and we duly followed on foot, back and fore along the western part of the perimeter track to keep ourselves opposite wherever they emerged.
Incidentally all this circumventing of the reservoir following the grebes back resulted in Peter and myself walking almost six miles but went unnoticed while enjoying the moment.
The next day would be a different matter!
I am sure if the reservoir had been less busy the grebes would have come closer but we had to make the best of it. Even so they did look an absolute picture swimming on the blue waters of the reservoir under a welcome sunlit sky.
They appeared to be a pair with one bird's plumage slightly brighter than the other and did everything in harmony, remaining close at all times and even diving in unison. To all extents they looked to be in full breeding plumage, with flared yellow orange plumes on each side of their black heads while the rest of their body was chestnut brown on neck, breast and flanks and black on the upperparts.Their neck and breast still retained some winter feathers of grey and white but these would soon be moulted.As always the red demonic eyes caught your attention
The windy conditions persuaded some windsurfers to take to the water and this fortuitously kept the grebes more or less towards our western half of the basin and sometimes, if a windsurfer came too close for comfort they would take alarm and fly a short distance before making an undignified crash landing, breast first onto the water.
Slavonian Grebes have two populations, one being found over much of northern Europe to northern Asia, breeding from eastern Iceland to the Russian Far East and numbering from 12,900 to 18,500 pairs. The other population is in North America where they are known as Horned Grebes and breed over much of Canada and some northern US states.The population there is estimated to be from 200,000 to 500,000 pairs. Both populations are in severe decline due mainly to human activities and the overall global population has declined by 30%.
In Britain they are a very rare breeding bird found only on a few lochs in the eastern Highlands of Scotland. In 2021 there were just 26 breeding pairs and the species is now Red Listed and classed as Vulnerable
I found myself humming a few bars from Hamish McCunn's stirring Scottish overture In the Land of the Mountain and the Flood based on a poem from a Walter Scott novel, The Lay of the Last Minstrel and fancifully I imagined these two were bound for the highlands of my ancestral home where they would arrive on a romantic hidden loch deep in the land of mountain and flood and far from the prosaic concrete bowl of an unremarkable reservoir in the middle of England.
They deserved nothing less.
In spirit I wished I could go with them
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