Wildlife in December

As the year closes there is still plenty of wildlife to see in the Norfolk countryside. Now is the time for watching waterfowl. Coastal saltmarshes are loud with the purrs of dark-bellied brent geese from Siberia. Freshwater marshes echo with the yaps of Icelandic pink-footed geese, many thousands of which spend the winter here. In the Yare Valley in Broadland one of the country’s only flocks of taiga bean geese is best seen in midwinter.

Ducks, such as wigeon, pintail, goldeneye and teal, are already turning their thoughts to breeding and are displaying in marshes and on lakes throughout the country. Among the flocks of whooper and Bewick’s swans at Welney in the Fens, thousands of male pochard may be seen.

A stroll through a Broadland fen on a clear day in December may be rewarded with an encounter with a handsome Chinese water deer or simply with the sight of the sun shining through the glassy red berries of a guelder rose. In the woods almost all the trees, even the beeches, have lost their leaves by now. The only splashes of green come, appropriately, from the holly and the ivy.