Duck Numbers

Having been awake very early this morning, well 2 am. to be honest. I was wandering around the house from 5.30 waiting to go down to the reserve. But a combination of only being two days past the Shortest Day and weather stuck in a pattern of heavy grey skies, mist and day-time murkiness, saw it still pretty much dark at past 7.00 and so I went anyway.
By the time that I got to the reserve (The Swale NNR), and had begun to walk across the marsh with little Ellie close by me, the darkness was just beginning to turn into a slightly lighter dawn. A couple of gunshots had rung out and so I knew to expect some wildfowlers out on the salting once I got on top of the sea wall and so it proved. There were two fairly close together and one other several hundred yards away from them. The two together immediately had a few more shots at birds that I couldn't see in the gloom and that was it as far their shooting went. I walked along to the lone guy, who by then was packing up and had a brief chat with him, he'd not shot anything. Then a little later, walked back to chat to the other two. They had shot just the one duck and so three wildfowlers had probably spent at least three hours sitting in mud, cold and darkness for a pretty poor return, not the slaughter that people like to accuse them of. Between us we spent a little while discussing what is turning out to be one of the poorest wildfowl shooting winters for several years, which goes hand in glove with the fact that the reserve is recording record low numbers of wildfowl and waders as well.
The days when ducks such as Wigeon, Teal and Mallard would leave the reserve each morning in their several hundreds, thousands sometimes, now seem well behind us and just a distant memory. I can recall counting flocks of Wigeon floating down The Swale off of the reserve in several thousands and yet I've seen just one this winter so far. Numbers that high probably haven't occurred for about ten years but as recent as five years ago there were still some respectable numbers to compare this month with:
Dec 2012
Wigeon 760
Mallard 190
Teal 140
Lapwing 900

Dec 18th 2017
Wigeon 0
Mallard 373
Teal 10
Lapwing 30

Compare also the counts of the same birds species at the Elmley reserve, just a few miles away, on the same day this month:

Dec 18th 2017
Wigeon 7017
Teal 1000
Mallard 1395

The biggest reason for so few birds at The Swale NNR in recent years, I guess has to be two very dry and mild winters, both wildfowl and waders need large areas of part flooded or waterlogged  habitat in which to bathe, feed and safely roost. There are none of those areas on the Swale NNR at the moment as I have repeatedly mentioned on my blogs, but then again, Elmley is almost just as dry. But the wildfowl had begun to favour Elmley before these recent dry winters, lured perhaps by the huge acreage of safe grazing meadows and wet areas and large tidal bays alongside that were safe from any shooting.
So, for the moment at least, the marshes at the eastern end of Sheppey remain pretty barren when it comes to wildfowl and waders and myself and my chums the wildfowlers will have to be content with what slim pickings that we get.