The morning sun is bright but shares little of its heat. It is the first day of gloves season but we have come out unknowing and our fingers bite.
We are at Essex Wildlife Trust’s Abberton Reservoir, about five miles from Colchester, looking for wildfowl, whose numbers are boosted in winter by visitors from the even colder north.
Looking west across the water from the Layer Breton causeway, we can see them in their hundreds. Shovelers swim head down in tight circles to stir up food.
The males are dark green and white, the females brown and while it is not uncommon to see this circular behaviour in singles or pairs, here they spin in large groups.
What looks like a small island is in fact several dozen of them huddled and turning together – whether to increase the power of their uplift, keep warm or both, we can only guess.
Sharing the water are teals. Small ducks, the males have a bold green flash running back from their eye. But what is this one? The eye flash is shaped like a cartoon lightning strike.
It turns out this is a hybrid with a Baikal teal – breeds in eastern Russia and winters in Asia – and the product of an escapee from captivity. This is at least its second winter at the reservoir. Who knows where it flies to for the summer.
Turning to the east we see goosanders, the least duck-like members of the duck family – more like cormorants in their shape, long and sitting low in the water with a serrated bill used for hunting fish. The males have a green head, the females and the young a chestnut brown.
Among them are goldeneye, with their peculiar head shaped like a badly drawn and wonky square. Beneath the yellow eye the male has a white patch, distinct even at distance. An oversized teardrop.
We drive to the Layer de la Haye causeway and scan east across the main body of water. The sun is high overhead now, the light clear and bright.
There are hundreds of coots – again, so many we initially mistake them for a landmass. Pochards are here and great-crested grebes.
A close-by raft of tufted ducks contains a male scaup, a rarer, larger cousin, also black and white and another winter visitor.
Scanning through the telescope further out we see a neat, smart looking bird with a tidy black cap on a shallow forehead, clean white cheeks and a charcoal grey body. It’s a Slavonian grebe – another uncommon northern breeder come south for winter.
Like its great-crested counterpart but only about two thirds the size, it swims underwater to catch fish and we watch as it launches up in order to propel itself down, as if merely dipping its head and diving would lack oomph. It is then a game to guess where it will resurface.
Further out still and a bruiser of a thing is a great northern diver – another low-slung waterbird but with a dagger of a bill that is clear even from here.
It is diving frequently so difficult to study closely but it has a great heft, muscular and dense – thick like an ox. The same size but more burly than a cormorant.
It sits up to shake its wings, opening out its huge white chest then settles once again. A giant on the reservoir come down from the frozen north.
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