This November I visited two wetland nature reserves, separated by 1,200 miles, with many contrasts but also intriguing similarities.

A Wharfedale Naturalists coach trip was my first visit to Saltholme RSPB reserve, a 90-minute drive north from Otley. It is a peaceful oasis ringed by chemical works, oil refineries and cooling towers, with the iconic Tees Transporter Bridge etched across the southern skyline.

Winter wildfowl were arriving, with a dozen whooper swans flown in from Iceland, probably en route to their main wintering grounds on the Ouse Washes.

A search of thousands of feral greylag and Canada geese produced a group of smaller barnacle geese, perhaps also of feral origin although I liked to think they were truly wild, arriving from their breeding grounds in Spitsbergen and heading for Caerlaverock on the Solway. One lucky person glimpsed a bittern, probably an arrival from the continent. Hordes of lapwings and golden plovers erupted from time to time but I scanned the sky in vain for a marauding raptor.

The other reserve was the Laguna de Fuente de Piedra, near Antequera in Andalucia, Spain’s biggest natural lake and a reserve I have visited many times. A shallow soda lake it can, depending on its water level, support huge numbers of flamingos with 24,000 pairs raising 20,000 young this year.

Most had departed southwards but several thousand remained, scattered around the lake or moving in pale pink lines, their heads immersed in the water. They would occasionally rise in surprisingly graceful flight to show bursts of vivid red and black in their wings.

The first wintering cranes had arrived, a flock feeding in stubble fields along the lake edge. A year previously, in the last week of October, we had seen lines of cranes passing over southwest France on an earlier leg of their migration, so it was good to see them at the end of their journey.

Having searched the Saltholme skies for peregrines and marsh harriers, at the Laguna I watched a dozen marsh harriers flying in to a reedbed roost, while a peregrine unsuccessfully harried a lapwing. Saltholme harboured a few shovelers while, at the Laguna, these ducks numbered hundreds, building towards a winter peak of 25,000, their numbers perhaps affected by the shoveler’s known sensitivity to the frozen conditions of recent northern European winters.

by Denis O'Connor, Wharfedale Naturalists' Society