On the Dutch Spectacled Eider twitch with Pete Moore, we quickly established that the Spectacled Eider hadn't been located early on our second morning. So, we decided to depart on the 10:00 ferry from Texel and head to a channel near the village of Anna Paulowna to look for a flock of Smew. After watching the male Smew displaying to the females, we needed to push onto our main target for the day at the Nature Park on the edge of Lelystad. Amsterdam has had a bad reputation for many years due to its red-light area, but we had a more interesting shag planned: with a nationally rare Pygmy Shag, or to be more accurate, a Pygmy Cormorant.
The Lelystad Nature Park has been tastefully designed to make it a popular visitor attraction with lots of lakes, as well as, things to keep younger visitors entertained.
First we popped into the visitors centre to pay for the parking and for a call of nature. The Lelystad visitor centre had some unexpected stuffed Mammals.
Thanks to Paul Rhodes for the following feedback on European Bison, which have been introduced into Zuid Kennemerland National Park, near Haarlem, to assist in vegetation control. They have come from the Polish Bialowieza Forest.
There was no news on the Pygmy Cormorant when we arrived, so we started to look around the lakes. This Scarlet Elfcap was the highlight: one of the few species of Fungi that I know.
We had just reached the far side of the lakes, when Pete said, that there was some news that the Pygmy Cormorant had just seen. Unfortunately, we were heading in the wrong direction and it was quicker to backtrack to the car park and take the other path to the other side of the lakes. Eventually, we reached the right area, only to find it was perched at the far end of the lake. We started to watch it through the scopes & to grab some distant photos.
While I was photographing the Tufted Ducks, Pete said that the Pygmy Cormorant had just taken off, before we could try walking closer. It did a distant pass, before disappearing from view.
We ran into a couple of Whooper Swans, as we were walking back to the car park. They looked suspiciously tame. Eventually, one walked onto the grass, where it was possible to see a ring on its leg and there was clearly a lot of damage to one of its wings when it briefly flapped them. Perhaps it was a wild individual, that had damaged its wing and has been forced to stick around at Lelystad.
The next part of the plan was for me to drop Pete at the railway station in Lelystad, so he could get a train into Amsterdam and met up with his wife, Claire and younger son, Rowan, who had arrived that lunchtime for a half term mini-break. My plan was for some Birding, a visit to some World War two battlefields and to visit Luxembourg: my seventy-nineth country. More about that in the next Blog Posts.