A glimpse into the secret life of the mandarin duck – a shy but beautiful bird that has made itself at home in the UK
Words and photos byNICK UPTON
MANDARINS ●
I f I watch long enough, I might see some intriguing animal behaviour that’s never been recorded before. It is this thought that has long driven me as a biologist, filmmaker and photographer to wait – and wait – for special moments, and still does.
Perhaps never more so than during the past year, which I’ve spent obsessively photographing stunning, mercurial mandarin ducks in a magical ancient woodland: the Forest of Dean.
The chance to document the rather secret life of arguably the world’s most beautiful duck arose in autumn 2022, when I was canoeing down the scenic River Wye, on England’s border with Wales. As the forest thickened below the imposing crags of Symond’s Yat, I spotted the unmistakeably flamboyant purple, green and orange feathers of three mandarin drakes, huddled together beside a smartly patterned brown and grey female, on a branch overhanging the water. What were these exotic-looking birds doing here in this unlikely spot?
These ‘perching’ wood ducks, which grip branches with long-clawed toes, are native to the Far East. I’d encountered a pair 20 years ago on a mountain lake in Taiwan while directing a film for the BBC. We secured some distant swimming shots, but didn’t go as far as seeking their nests, which are made in tree-holes deep in the forest up to a mile from water. Mandarin ducks are revered in eastern cultures for their beauty, and symbolise wedded bliss due to the drakes’ attentiveness. They feature in oriental poems, on prints, paintings, porcelain and textiles, but few Taiwanese ever see these scarce, shy birds.
In the UK, we’ve long been able to observe mandarin ducks as part of wildfowl collections. A drake was sketched in a Richmond estate in 1745, the first breeding pair was recorded in London Zoo in 1834, and many were kept in menageries from the early 1900s. But the birds soon broke free of their ornamental confines. Escapees and released individuals founded breeding colonies on wooded country estates in Bedfordshire, Surrey and Shropshire, and have been quietly living in the wild here ever since, expanding their range across England and into parts of Scotland and Wales.
Gloucestershire’s Forest of Dean has become a major stronghold, with more than 250 mandarins now present since th
