Where to see wigeon in the UK

How to find wigeon

Wigeon is the one bird on this site where the month settles the question before you have chosen anywhere to go. January holds 2,445 of the 14,339 occurrence records gathered across the nine counties with enough data here to draw a curve — 17.1% — and July holds 128, which is 0.9%. Nineteen January records for every July one. All nine counties peak between October and March, seven of them in January, and of the 54 species with curves on this site only whooper swan agrees with itself that completely across a comparable spread of ground. So the odds of seeing a wigeon are decided by the calendar, and everything below is about what to do once you are standing there.

Those figures count records, not birds, and the caveat carries less weight here than anywhere else on this site. A nineteen-fold swing is not a story about how many people are out with binoculars in January. Wigeon wintering in Britain are mostly birds that bred in Iceland, Scandinavia and northern Russia — general ornithology, not something occurrence records can demonstrate — and in July almost all of them are somewhere else entirely.

Two counties dissent about which winter month is best, and both dissents are useful. Cornwall peaks in October, 23.8% of its 1,682 records, and then holds up through January rather than tailing off; Hayle Estuary is the most south-westerly estuary in Britain and our record for it notes that it almost never freezes, which is why a cold snap that empties the east coast is a reason to drive west rather than a reason to stay home. Northamptonshire peaks in March instead, 14.1% of the 1,548 records gathered around Summer Leys, a reserve built on old gravel workings in the Nene valley. Everywhere else on the list, January.

The thing that makes wigeon findable once you are there is that they graze. Most ducks feed in the water; wigeon walk out onto flooded grass and saltmarsh and crop it like small geese, which is why the reserves that hold them are the ones that go under in winter. Scan the field rather than the lake — on a reserve that has both, a good few visitors spend twenty minutes failing to see wigeon on the water. A distant flock reads as a grey-brown carpet that moves slowly and all in one direction, and it stops looking like wet grass the moment a single bird lifts its head.

You will usually hear them before any of that. The drake's call is a clean two-note whistle, rising and falling, much closer to somebody signalling a dog than to a duck, and several hundred of them produce it in overlapping waves that carry across a whole floodplain. Females answer with a short growl that does not travel at all. On a still afternoon in December the whistling is the sound of the place.

Close to, a drake is a chestnut head with a butter-yellow stripe up the forehead, a pink-washed breast and a grey back. The light on a flooded meadow in January is flat and low, though, and most of the time the head reads plain brown and the stripe not at all. At range the mark that works is the white patch on the rear flank, just ahead of the black stern, and in flight the white oval on the drake's forewing settles it beyond argument. Females are warm brown and easy to lose among teal.

Two practical points the reserve pages tend to leave out. The first is that a flooded grazing marsh in January is flooded, and the path, the car park and the last stretch to the hide belong to the same field as the birds. Bowling Green Marsh beside the Exe has no car park at all — visitors park in Topsham and walk about ten minutes — and Devon's 2,335 records peak in January at 18.8% against 0.5% in July, so the walk is worth it in the right month and pointless in the wrong one. The second is that wigeon feed by night as readily as by day and often spend the middle of the day asleep on open water. A flock that is not out on the grass at noon has not gone anywhere.

If one visit has to do it, take flooded grazing marsh between December and February. West Sussex holds the biggest single block of records here, 3,384, with 16.1% of them in January, and Pulborough Brooks looks down on the Arun floodplain from a wooded ridge — 600 metres of surfaced path downhill to the hides, and the same 600 metres uphill at the end of the afternoon, which is the part people underestimate. Marshside on the Ribble is the low-effort alternative, since much of it can be watched from the road, and Merseyside's records peak in January at 17.0%. If your county is not in the list below, that is a fact about this directory's coverage rather than about the bird.