I think this is a duck of some species or other — it doesn’t look bulky enough to be a goose, but I might be wrong. Either way this huge but dead tree is certainly a good lookout post in the ongoing duck-pigeon conflict and was being protectively employed as such this morning.
On went the weekend. The only bad thing about weekends at the moment is that they only last two days. The weather wasn’t great, though it was hardly a natural disaster, despite the hysteria which now accompanies any period of low pressure that the Met Office decide is worthy of a name. I can still go walking in the woods, right guys? Is that OK?
He’s not doing much, just posing. But I got the focus right, which is by no means always the case, and so I hope he’s happy with the portrait, not that he’ll ever see it. (Unless these birds have an internet life about which we are ignorant.)
One’s things for sure about the weather of 2026: our fruit have loved it. The apples are the last in the series but like everything else, there’s plenty of them and they taste very fine. The ladybird seems content enough, too.
I mused the other day that pigeons were one of a few species who I feel do alright out of humanity, and I think that one reason is that we provide them with so many useful little places of settlement. And I pick the word specifically, because these two look very settled to me, able to rest and not worry about some cat or hawk feeling that they’re a possible source of dinner. Home is under a railway bridge, many feet above the road: I only spotted these two because I was on the top deck of a bus. I like the various colours and textures on this shot.
“Right you ‘orrible lot!”, cries the sergeant-major at the back. “This is the tidal limit of the Ribble right here and we will take no prisoners! Keep an eye out for that tidal bore which is due any minute now…. YOU! At the end! Wake up laddie!”
Hey, I’m sure gulls are as attuned to the hydrodynamics of their local area way more than any human. I had to look that stuff up on Wikipedia, but they knew it already — food is on its way upriver.
Weirs are the creation of engineers, and this one, on the River Dee in Chester, is nearly a thousand years old, built by the Normans. On the downstream side, the tidal estuary begins. The main beneficiaries of this are those upstream who are thus defended from tidal flooding, and the local birdlife, who find in it a very convenient place to go fishing. The one at the top has just eaten, in fact, but is still hanging around for more.
“And together now…. one, two, three, leg up and TUCK that head…. and now SLEEP.”
“Hang on, did we put anyone on watch? Ah, who cares.”
Dipsacus fullonum has been used as a natural comb since antiquity, particularly to clean woollens and raise the nap on them (that is, make them fuzzy, like velvet) — and one can see why. One might even argue whether humans would ever even have invented the comb had they not had the teasel as a model. As seen in Raleigh Park, Oxford, just across the road from my accommodation here.
It might be a dragonfly or possibly a damselfly: apparently they are very similar. Whichever one it is, it’s a predator, and imagine (if the scales were different) this thing coming towards you intent on murder, for surely what it actually is, is a flying Egyptian mummy/vampire.
