Short Stopping Mallard

[scolopax]

Waiting for a chopper to the rigs offshore Stavanger, Norway,  I had a few hours to kill so took a walk down a short section of ‘fjord’ adjacent to the airport.   In about 400 m of shore I counted 314 mallard plus many more up the channel in the first photo.  Also there were about 50 wigeon, and a few scoter and eider further offshore.  
 

further around on the unsheltered rocky coastline I saw many hundreds of mallard last winter. They seemed happy sitting on rocks and dabbling in seaweed, no doubt flighting the short distance on an evening to flood water on potato fields.

With the cold weather due we can only hope they have some vestige of a memory of old migartion routes and once more cross the North Sea.

Two years ago they had a very cold spell right up to the coast (normally the serious cold in confined inland) and afterwards a lot of dead woodcock were found, I saw some myself. No doubt bird which also short stopped but in this case were caught out by a couple of weeks of temps cold enough to freeze the sea and the fjord in the photo.