Country diary: egrets are enchanting at this great watery expanse
An unfamiliar sonorous rattle passes over the yellowing aspens, emitted by an elegantly expansive bird as immaculate as virgin snow, a great white egret. It drops down behind the autumnal trees to alight in the shallows of a freshwater lagoon that abuts the largest artificial lake in western Europe.
Rutland Water was constructed in the valley of the River Gwash in the 1970s to store water for the growing population of the East Midlands. A huge clay dam piled up at Empingham flooded 10.86 square kilometres of farmland and a small village. As a body of water in England the resulting lake is second only to Windermere in surface area.
The great watery expanse is ringed by a cycle track and hosts many sailors and rod fishers. Tens of thousands of people teem into Anglian Water’s biggest asset, but the company’s literature boasts that more than 20,000 birds also regularly find home on and around the reservoir.
Indeed, the site is of international importance for waterbirds and is methodically monitored by dedicated volunteers as part of the Wetland Bird Survey. Last autumn and winter 24,700 birds visited the reserve, the highest figure in the past six years. The most abundant fowl are wigeon, gadwall, cormorant, great crested grebe, coot, lapwing, mallard and tufted duck, the latter topping the charts with a count of 8,800 last October.
Related: Country diary: wow, there's a great white in the canal
Today there are indeed large numbers of duck dabbling, diving and filtering in the string of shallow lagoons and bays along the western end of the reservoir that constitute the Egleton nature reserve. However, the stars of the show are without a doubt the egrets.
Along the margin a loose flock stalks the shallows, their unblemished plumage shining in the gathering gloom. There are 50 little egrets and, towering over them, eight great whites. Combined with another aggregation along the edge of the main reservoir I count 60 littles and 14 greats, only a little shy of the 80 and 15 maximum counts for the whole of Rutland Water last winter: these welcome recent colonists are thriving indeed in Rutland.
