Williamson's Weekly Nature Notes

They start to arrive in October, peak at Christmas, and are gone again by April or May.

The red-breasted merganser is the commoner of the two, and about 200 spend their winter in Chichester Harbour, the seventh-largest concentration of them in the UK.

I say easily missed because mergansers dive underwater looking for small fish. They like to be in the deep water in the big channels, and they are often lost among the paddlings of wigeon, so you have to search for them at some distance.

Much more rare is the other bird shown here, which is the goosander.

Only a dozen to a score visit the whole of Sussex, so a goosander is a worthy tick on your list of 'must-see' birds.

For the full feature, see the West Sussex Gazette issue dated September 17, 2008.