Once news came out, I was there just after 10:00 and so was a group of a dozen locals - watching from the 'viewpoint' conveniently close to the road! The teal was on the nearest (northern) pool with a few Mallard and clearly much smaller. It was as close as it could be but still pretty distant, even for the 500mm lens and all the early views were of it head down, frantically feeding in the shallows!
The occasional wing stretch confirmed the blue wing panel.....
Flushed by the occasional dog walker, one distant flight shot was possible!
One feature which didn't seem quite right was the bill. I had my scope handy and as others had remarked, it was clearly large.....
And as seen in this head on shot, somewhat Shoveler-like albeit smaller.....
A brief wander about more distantly in the shallows gave a chance to check out the legs - no rings and the colour seemed OK in these - appearing much darker against white water, the light seemed to have a big influence on leg colour.
There's more images out there. Check out these better images on the Grimley birding site . LGRE was adamant at the time it was Blue-winged Teal x Northern Shoveler. You can find his observations here
There's also been a suggestion it could be a female Cinnamon Teal (or hybrid of) which looks another reasonable possibility?
It's taken me a while to make time to view / sort these and it will be interesting to see if a definite conclusion is reached? I need to do some web trawling to make my own conclusions but for now it's unclear exactly what it is other than a 'Blue-winged' Duck for now.....
